ruth jones
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Ruth Jones is an artist based in Pembrokeshire, South Wales. Her work explores liminal, or threshold states of being or consciousness. The liminal realm is a transitional one, a passageway between two distinct states eg. awake / asleep, conscious / unconscious, alive / dead. Anthropologist Victor Turner has described it as ‘a place that is not a place and a time that is not a time’. The uncertainty of these in-between states has led them to be regarded with suspicion and anxiety. Through installations, public art projects and film work, Ruth creates physical or psychological spaces in which the possibility of an experience of liminality can occur for the viewer or participant. Using ritual patterns, the work attempts not only to access the liminal realm, but also to suspend activity in it indefinitely, revealing the enormous potential for ‘becoming’ that this space offers.
Recent projects have focused on the three way relationships between humans animals and the land. The work draws on magico-mythological readings of land as well as recent reconceptualisations of land and rural places in fields such as anthropology and cultural geography. Many of the projects make use of public spaces and pay attention to the particularity of place, often engaging people or communities who have a connection to the site of the project directly in the process in the process of developing and creating the work.
Ruth has recently started a three year AHRC research fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts. The research will build on her practice led DPhil - 'Liminality, Risk and Repetition: towards a feminine becoming in contemporary art practices' to address the following questions: What are the conditions required for generating liminality within site-specific installation and public art practice and what consequences does this have for rethinking the relationships between ‘place’, ‘identity’ and ‘gender’?
A new body of research will focus on establishing the optimum conditions to generate liminal phenomena through an artwork, and will explore the cultural effects that this could have. In order to do this, she will be examining how we can access the liminal realm through artworks by altering our experience of time through ritual. Public art projects, site-specific installation and lens-based work will be the predominant mediums employed to achieve this. As part of the research, she will also be seeking to develop and establish a network of artists and researchers working in the same field in order to curate a series of site-specific public art projects called Holy Hiatus in and around Cardigan, West Wales, with the intention of exploring the different strategies which artists employ to create liminal experience and the effects this can have for audiences and participants. These projects, a symposium and an accompanying publication will aim to contribute to and promote further dialogue and research into liminality and its cultural implications.