top of page

Holding Time

18 February – 12 March 2023

 

Rogue Project Space

Holding Time is an exhibition by Ruth Murray and Linda Hemmersbach. It explores their mutual fascination with the materiality of paint and its ability to evoke places and sensations through colour, surface and touch. Focusing on the relationship between ourselves and the environments we inhabit and through which we move, the exhibition aims to show the many shared avenues that their studio practices have taken. Themes such as landscape, geological matter, deep time, the body and birth, are presented as constellations of memory, consciousness and hope.

 

Ruth’s brushwork has the messy, writhing quality of natural forms. At close range her scenes and isolated figures dissolve into patterns and surfaces, establishing striking correspondences between trees, leaves, stones, and waves. Hinting at natural forms and forces, Linda’s paintings impart the sensation of staying, looking and feeling. Both artists convey the universality of matter as always in the process of silent reformation and resurfacing. In moving between the paintings, the viewer experiences a transference of energy as if from one manifestation of this underlying process to another. 

 

The artists’ interest in the world’s visible and invisible processes is reflected in their handling of paint as a malleable material and physical container of time - resulting in works that are densely layered, allowing brushstroke and touch to carry a sense of energy and sensitivity for their subjects. In their sculptures, too, both artists favour malleable materials with a prehistoric pedigree, clay and metal. 


The show elucidates a tension, viewing nature as a repository of the deep past, but also viewing it as a timeless place that bears witness, an immanent, everlasting presence. The works hint at something just out of reach, beyond our understanding: a world of its own, complete in itself, independent of us. Yet this underlying world also runs through us all: we are ourselves manifestations of universal matter, like layers of sedimentary rock, holding time.

bottom of page