#205 Ruby Bateman
Ruby is a London based visual artist and Royal College of Art graduate. Her practice engages with poetry, philosophy and feminist discourse to discuss how the personal and the political intersect. Her work, ‘born from love and loss’, critically explores notions of institutionalised motherhood, personal narrative, conflicting desires and the concept of being a ‘free woman’. Currently working in the medium of super 8 film, she is creating visual codes that show the paradoxes of the maternal experience using sculpture, the female figure and choreography.
What mystery, intoxication or devastation awaits in maternal love?
What are your needs in this hellish claustrophobia?
Is the woman doomed to fail?
How do you retell and rework the stories that shaped your life?
Would you consider the body a topographical landscape?
What would you exorcise from childhood?
What is revealed: enlightenment or destruction?
What is the route of passiveness?
How do you subvert the practicalities and realities of womanhood?
Imagine motherhood as an institution.
