Top Image: Going Down?
In order to access the exhibition on the first floor, audience members had to share an elevator with a girl in large double bed, by climbing onto the bed and being alone with her.

Ruth Pringle

I first came to Art Gene as an artist in residence, in 2007 (see below) and returned as a Revisioning Utopia Charette participant in 2009. I remain actively involved in various ways.

At that time I was based in France, since returning to the UK I’ve been involved with Art Gene in various ways. I genuinely love their creativity, their holistic approaches – and their ambition. I am proud to play a part in it.

Most recently I’ve been guest curator on the U-Hang @ Art Gene Exhibition Programme. I’ve selected artists to exhibit, and worked with them to develop their work in response to the needs and peculiarities of the space.

My own practice spans installation, sound, film and writing. It is quite broad and diverse, but generally I try to give glimpses of a world which works on an alternative logic. My works appear lighthearted, but they do contain sadness towards the systems which prevent such alternatives from ever being real.

You can read about my residency with Art Gene here.

1st image below: Forever Free

An installation of turntables chiming out an endlessly varied soundscape as they all play small parts of the song ‘Born Free,’ but with their playing arms tethered by elastic bands, dragging the needles back after just a few notes.

Image above: The Conductor
Where an inflatable publicity figure becomes the conductor of an orchestra.

France and Belgium: Some writing

Read about an unusual road trip here
Or about an art exhibition in a run down Brussels street here

The Great Wave
In which I placed commercial reproductions of the Hokusai print, The Great Wave, into every laundromat in Chicago (268).
Inspired by arriving in the mid-west, and discovering that being distant from the sea felt disconcerting.
I imagined that the waves and rhythms within laundrettes might become a kind of urban ocean substitute for communities without collective memory of the sea.