Time and Tide

Ruth Broadway is a multi-media artist based in Bristol.

Ruth’s work captures things at the cusp of change – a moon, a moth, a girl, a woman, the tide. Ruth uses the physical acts of stitching, dyeing, printing, collecting and preserving to tether the ephemeral. This exhibition shows how the rituals of daily noticing, recording and making can foster appreciation of the quiet transformation happening around us.

Inspired by traditional folk craft, Ruth embraces the prosaic nature of these techniques to create work that becomes love-letters to the passing of time, transformation and the fragility of life. Folktales – especially ones where the unexceptional hero must overcome apparently impossible obstacles (spinning straw into gold, silently weaving barbed shirts for seven cursed brothers, finding the way home by following bread crumbs and so on) – are a ceaseless source of inspiration and can be seen in the repetitive techniques Ruth uses. She is drawn to stories of transformation, whether physical or metaphorical; dramatic and magical or slow and ordinary.

“My work is a walk through the (deep dark) woods even when you find yourself in the city. I like to discover forgotten and disregarded things; a moulted feather, a lip-stick blot, fingerprints on a mirror. To me these found things that have been cast off become an opportunity to tenderly work subtle interventions and try to tell their stories.

My work is influenced by nature and the marks we leave behind and attempting to preserve both. I find myself trying to straddle the gap between human control and ordering of data, formation and display and letting nature, the elements, life cycles and time take the lead – adapting my materials according – and in response to – a situation or object as I find it. I seek to retain and catch a transient moment, thing or memory and hold it forever.”