Our Autumn Open Call Memento Vivere runs October 10th to 18th, featuring twenty three of talented artists showcasing a range of styles and mediums.

Ruaridh Law is a sound artist and musician based in Ayrshire, Scotland. Over 20 years he has performed in groups, in collaborations and solo across a wide range of festivals, arts spaces, venues and clubs as performer, improviser, DJ and artist. Latterly his interests have been in sound and installation art. These works have ranged from intimate audio performance, to large-scale outdoor works combining sound walks, improvised performance and experimental storytelling.

His artistic focus is on data-visualisation, human voices and their stories, unusual paradigms for performance and composing, and marrying abstraction to a beating human heart. These have manifested themselves in a tarot deck that generates music, sequential stories told over film and radio, right-wing propaganda twisted and sanitised into more worthwhile content and a walk through a forest and its imagined mythologies in the dead of night – as well as countless CD, DVD, vinyl and other music releases.

Hi Ruaridh! Can you tell us how has your practice changed over time?
I started off when I was around 17-18 as a musician – making electronic music in a group and alone, then starting to DJ and get involved in performing live, improvisations with other artists, etc. This was my entire creative focus for pretty much 15 years, until 2015 when by chance I was asked to contribute to something that crossed over into outdoor installation as much as live performance. Once I realised that the daft, impractical ideas I kept having could be realised, and (maybe more importantly) that there were people equally daft who would enable and platform this, I started to think about expressing the ideas without being limited by the medium I was used to working in.

What advice would you give to artists who are just starting out?
Never, ever, ever give up. If you get rejected or feel that you aren’t connecting with enough people, that just means you haven’t found your audience yet. Stay true to your own creative impulses and don’t compromise for the sake of popularity – it’s better to have an intense meaningful connection with 10 people than a transient shallower brief connection with 500. Never feel restricted by “your” medium – you can learn to do anything given the right conversations or going online. There is a huge volume of amazing people who love to help other creative people embrace new ways of working, you just need to ask.

Which artists inspire you? Are there non-artistic influences such as literature or music that impact your work?
My knowledge of art history probably stops at the late 60s! All my influences are from literature and music. I think finding artists who can cross boundaries of medium are the most interesting – David Keenan, Leonora Carrington, Paul Purgas, Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, Clare Archibald are all artists who straddle across different artforms without any sense of overreaching. It all feels like a consistent body of work. Musically artists like Kali Malone and Sarah Davachi are really interesting to me just now – using very old methods and instrumentation (often organs) to make incredible slow moving pieces teeming with hidden life, whilst also building a personal mythology around their work that adds extra layers.

How do you typically approach your creative process from initial inspiration to the completion of your artwork?
This one is hard to answer, as I genuinely often don’t remember the creative process for any given work. I get the idea – often fully formed, as a very clear picture in my brain – and then I semi-obsessively work that through to its end point, learning whatever processes I need to do along the way to get there. If this means I need to learn to code, or to deep-dive into camera lenses I know nothing about, or learn from scratch how to get books made up, then so be it! When I look back on any given work, I only remember the start point and the end point – the middle is a kind of fugue, grey fog covering how I actually got there.

Will your next project be a continuation of your current style or are you experimenting with something different? Can you share a glimpse of your next project?
Firstly, I’m just starting the preparatory work on the next No Roof Only Sky book. This one is edited (and collated) by my long term collaborator Dave Donnelly and will be a practical manual for anti-fascist actions.

Secondly, I’m working on developing my Bare Windows, Many Shades video installations. These are little video boxes that can be installed anywhere – so far I’ve placed one above the dancefloor of the London club The Glove That Fits (appositely, as the videos on the box are attempts by me to recreate my brain’s very hazy memories of club nights from the late 90s / early 2000s) and I’m working on an audio accompaniment to go with them. Would love to install these in some clubs up here.

Lastly, next year I’m going to do some work to finish developing my Territory performance piece which is loosely akin to djing with mapped walks (using turntables to play through audio and video of walks carried out beforehand or during the performance). I performed it online during COVID for the BEAST collective in Birmingham but plan to develop it further into a performance for two people, one of whom will be walking outside / around the performance space live.

Are there any upcoming events or additional information you would like the audience to know?
As linked above, my wee book publishing platform No Roof Only Sky has had a good first year and we have lots more to come. We’re always interested in getting new things published so we’re very open to submission. And you can check out audio at Broken20, Logic Of The Signifier, and all the rest of my art things at ruaridhTVO.com

See Ruaridh’s work at Memento Vivere, which runs at Six Foot Gallery until Friday 18th October.