Ruth Waller

'When a painter with little grasp of chemistry is introduced to a Free Radical chemistry lab, it’s a challenge for both scientist and artist: chemists grapple with communicating highly complex research; the artist struggles to understand an alien field. I hope I grasped some of the basic principles. It struck me that our relation to Free Radical chemistry is necessarily ambivalent: on one hand free radicals are essential to the processes of life, on the other, they are our undoing. There is no free radical imagery, we can’t “picture” them; I sought instead to personify this ambivalence, reinterpreting a familiar figure: Bruegel’s Dulle Griet. Griet is something of a Free Radical- on one hand a survivor, a force of nature in a perilous world, on the other, an exploiter, plundering those around her in the interests of her own survival and throwing the world into greater instability. Apparently Free Radical research applied to industry promises technologies which will render things less vulnerable to wear and tear. Will the surfaces of the future always look new? As a painter I often find meaning and pleasure in the traces of time evident in worn and faded surfaces. So this work is about that sense of ambivalence.'

Exhibited at Griffin Gallery in Insight Radical in August 2013.

BORN

1955 Sydney, Australia

EDUCATION

BA Painting – Alexander  Mackie, CAE, Sydney, 1978

(Last updated 14.11.2014)