25 January – 6 March 2022

Ruth Cleland is originally from the Waikato and is currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She graduated from the Dunedin School of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1998 and Master of Fine Arts (with distinction) in 2002, specialising in printmaking. Ruth has won several awards, including the NZ Painting and Printmaking Award in 2003, and the Park Lane Wallace Trust Development Award in 2008, which included a three-month artist residency at the Vermont Studio Centre in the USA. 

Ruth Cleland’s photorealist paintings and abstractions encourage us to slow down and notice details in our daily surroundings. Throughout her career Cleland has depicted her locale – from timber-clad Victorian-era Ōtepoti flats, to suburban streets and roundabouts in Kirikiriroa, to generic shopping malls, supermarkets and parking buildings in Tāmaki Makaurau. While each space is recognisable and familiar, Cleland bares few clues as to precisely where each scene derives. Instead, she takes the viewer through a series of intimate observations which have consumed her attention: the bright illumination of a fluorescent lamp on a polished terrazzo floor, the absorbent glow of daylight on an oil-drenched tarmac car park, and so on. The almost forensic fidelity with which she reproduces these fleeting interplays of light and materials probes the threshold between pictorial space and abstraction.