Fig. 10 (ice)

Ruth Waller was born in Sydney and studied at the Alexander Mackie School of Art in Sydney in the 1970s (now College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales). In 2000 she completed a Master of Arts at the ANU School of Art, where she has taught since 1990; she is currently the Head of the Painting Workshop.

Waller has exhibited her work in Australia for over twenty-five years, in solo and group shows, and she is represented in regional, state and national collections throughout the country. Her early painting demonstrated a strong interest in the natural world, in eco-systems in danger, in undervalued, invisible and unseen life forms. In recent years her focus has shifted more towards the act of seeing in painting, and painting’s history of representation. Italian and Northern Renaissance art has provided very rich source material for some extraordinarily layered and reflective painting, which has also reflected contemporary and personal subjects.

In recent years the Canberra Museum and Gallery has acquired two works by Waller for the collection, the paintings Dulle Griet 2003 and Deposition 2005, which illustrate her intellectual and aesthetic grasp in drawing on, respectively, a sixteenth-century subject by Pieter Bruegel and fifteenth-century Northern European altarpieces.

Fig. 10(ice) is from Waller’s exhibition, The new paintings, at Watters Gallery in Sydney (30 April to 24 May 2008), and represents a further development in the artist’s oeuvre. In this series Waller has painted crumpled and spread-out sheets of paper as almost transparent against a background of coloured squares and rectangles that invoke hard-edge painting of the 1960s and 1970s. The folds and creases in the flattened-out sheets of paper suggest various figures and forms, rather like the images that emerge from shapes in nature or miraculous religious imagery from relics such as the Shroud of Turin. They are exquisitely painted intriguing works, and contain multiple references to the history of painting and to the act of seeing and painting’s own history.