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 focusses are 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.

See Ruaridh’s work as part of our annual Spring open call, Keep Your Eye on the Doughnut, Not the Hole, which runs April 3rd to 24th, featuring an incredible collection of works by thirty artists leaning into joy, curiosity, and the often surreal pleasure of focusing on what is rather than what isn’t, in a myriad of mediums.

Hi Ruaridh, thanks for being with us! How did you arrive at the theme of your work?
In some ways there’s nothing more tedious than people (usually men) in their middle age exploring the things that inspired them when they were 25 years younger and full of youthful exuberance. But equally, these experiences leave a mark; and whilst hearing other people’s chemical-addled, nostalgia-driven tales of youthful excess can be very boring, they are usually delivered purely through rose-tinted spectacles. I thought a more abstract approach to trying to nail down my own memories of the mid 90s to 2010 era in nightclubs, both in Glasgow and further afield, might give me a chance to explore how those memories hold up in the cold light of day whilst using light, colour, smeared pixels and pulsing lines to express them; mostly shorn of the people, leaving only the ghostly imprint on the lens. Using Youtube videos from the time and then heavily processing them, the shades congregate around the light like near-invisible moths – the things that often get left out of these recollections of days gone by are the cavernous spaces, the emptiness behind the lights and the sometimes solipsistic loneliness of being locked into the moment.

Can you elaborate on the significance or symbolism of the chosen title of your work?
It legitimately came to me in a dream! I woke up with the words in my head and a memory of windows in a tower block pulsing with light. I realise that’s a pretty pretentious answer but it chimes nicely with the theme of the show.

Are there any upcoming events or additional information you would like the audience to know?
I have an installation in the new SSA exhibition, The Land, at The Dick Institute in Kilmarnock (until June), combining artist’s book, video, print and found objects. I’ll be doing a new performance piece, Territory II, live in the studio for Radiophrenia’s 2025 broadcast at the end of April, combining playback of a walk via a turntable controlling the map, and a phoned-in simultaneous walk around the north-west of Glasgow via my mum on her mobile. I’ll also be at the Counterflows Print Fair releasing the latest book on my small press imprint No Roof Only Sky, which is a pseudonymously written guide to organising anti-fascist activities, put together by a Glasgow activist collective. Then I’ll probably have a sleep for a while.

Find out more about Ruaridh’s work on his website or on Instagram. Keep Your Eye on the Doughnut, Not the Hole runs at Six Foot Gallery until Thursday 24th April 2025.