Art on a Postcard Mini Auction Curated by Jack Trodd

About 

Ruth Calland is a painter, performer, curator and Jungian analyst. She has a specialist interest both clinically and creatively in alchemy, and the emergence of the new, as part of the processes of creativity, healing, and social change. Her live art has explored psychic connectivity between people both living and ancestral, telepathic connection with cultural artefacts, and related to sea creatures and the sea as symbolic conduits for the collective unconscious. Ruth is a member of Contemporary British Painting and in 2021 curated Darkness at Noon for CBP. This group exhibition at APT Gallery, London, used the alchemical concept of nigredo, the dark night of the soul, as a lens through which to reflect on the pandemic. She received a grant from the London Borough of Culture awards for another curated project in 2019, Archipelago, which took 9 artists to work onsite from the nine islands of the Walthamstow Wetlands. In 1922 she was selected to be the first artist in residence for Pasture Project Space, Sudbury. Ruth has exhibited nationally and internationally as a painter, has been included in the New Contemporaries at the ICA, shown recently at Transition Gallery, Oceans Apart and Pineapple Black, and was included in the Contemporary British Painting show Made In Britain, 80 Painters of the 21st Century, at Yantai Museum and touring to Nanjing and Tianjin in China in 2017, and Gdansk, Poland in 2019. She has been a prize-winner at Southwark Gallery Open, a Rome Scholar runner up, Boise Travelling Scholarship winner, and included twice in the Marmite Prize for Painting. 

Education 

MA, Chelsea College of Art 

Select Exhibitions/Awards 

2023 It’s Coming from Inside, (part of Windows and Thresholds), at Bell House, part of Dulwich Festival, curated by Sarah Sparkes and Jane Millar  

2023 X’, Newcastle Contemporary, curated by Narbi Price, Newcastle  

2022 Paint Edgy: Contemporary British Painting & Guests, The Ropewalk Gallery, Barton on Humber 2022 Stand Close and Breathe Me In, curated by Enzo Marra, Elysium, Swansea  

2022 On Paper, curated by Matthew Macaulay, PAPER, Manchester  

2022 Frequencies (for Healing), curated by Hayley Lock, Confer/Karnac, London.  

2022 Paradoxes, Quay Arts, Newport, Isle of Wight 2021 Darkness at Noon: Nigredo of a Pandemic, APT Gallery, London (curator).  

2020 Vitalistic Fantasies, The Cello Factory, London 2020 Picture Palace, Transition Gallery  

2019 Made In Britain, 82 Painters of the 21st Century, National Museum, Gdansk  

2017 Contemporary Masters from Britain: 80 British Painters of the 21st Century, Yantai Museum and touring to Nanjing and Tianjin  

2017 Anything Goes, curated by Anna McNay, Bermondsey Project Space, London AWARDS  

2022 Residency, Pasture Project Space, Sudbury UK  

2020 Michael Fordham Prize for best paper of 2019, Int Journal of Analytical Psychology,  

2019 Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture grant (curator, Archipelago)  

2010 Prizewinner, Southwark Cafe Gallery Open  

2007 Henry Moore Foundation grant (artist, Hastings Museum, Yes Yes Y’All)  

2007 Arts Council Grant (artist, Transition Gallery: O Dreamland)  

2006 Waltham Forest Arts Council Grant  

1998 Art 4 All Grant (curator, Undercurrents)  

1988 GLOSCAT Staff Research Grant  

1987 Boise Travelling Scholarship  

1987 Reserve, Rome Scholarship  

1987 Fellowship in Painting, Glos. College of Art & Technology, Cheltenham  

Gallery Representation 

I have sold work through Transition Gallery, Paton Gallery, Lamont Gallery, and have shown twice at Flowers East (Small is Beautiful). 

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork 

‘Sunbat’ is a portrait of one of the bats I filmed on location at Sudbury Mill Pond in 2022, when I was artist in residence at Pasture Project Space in Sudbury. Bats appear at dusk, at the threshold between night and day, and so seem very connected to the liminal, and the border between consciousness and unconsciousness. My interest in early vampire films connects to this subject, and to the alchemical process of transformation from one form into another, one state into another. The appearance of bats always feels special and uncanny, as birds are going home, and before the darkness of night descends. 

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