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Ruth Calland

Ruth Calland's paintings are made blind, by not looking directly at the canvas but retaining instead a visual awareness of the image to be painted. This process leaves a space for play and reinvention to superimpose itself upon the picture, like some weird poltergeist imprint. As Adrian Searle, writing in The Guardian, recently pointed out “only mediocre painting never dares, or edits out its snarl-ups and chaotic passages.”

For Calland, creation and destruction are inextricably linked, her trance-like process meditating on violent acts, the sacred and the profane. She believes that “it is important to enter the terror and chaos of our own destructive impulses, in order to know our full nature”. The resulting blind images often appear partially dismantled or in disarray, their lack of resolution a reality that becomes part of the subject itself.


Ruth Calland is an artist and psychotherapist.