Ruaridh Law is an artist, writer, film-maker and musician based in North Ayrshire, Scotland. His works have ranged from intimate audio performance and gallery installations to large-scale outdoor works, music releases and books. These have manifested themselves in, amongst other things, a tarot deck that generates music; sequential stories told over film and radio; simultaneous spiral soundwalks across countries; a portal into the Atlantic Ocean via slow moving text and film; and a walk through a forest and its imagined mythologies in the dead of night. This year his first solo gallery show, Triadic Paths, opened at Gray Area gallery, San Francisco. He runs No Roof Only Sky, an imprint/label releasing audio and small books.

See Ruaridh’s work as part of our annual summer open call exhibition, Melting Point. While days grow long and shorts shorten, Six Foot Gallery is delighted to host twenty nine artists exploring art as an alchemical process; the heat of summer as an artistic catalyst, plus our Sextet listening station is back with twenty-one new pieces for you to spend some quality time with.

Hi Ruaridh! Can you elaborate on the significance or symbolism of the chosen title of your work?
Blocklist was a film that I started to work in during the COVID lockdown. The idea had been floating around for longer, but the officially-mandated-thirty-minutes-exercise brought on by lockdown restrictions made it easy to go out across different parts of Glasgow and film in the relative quiet, often accompanied by my partner (at a safe distance) or my two boys. The initial idea came from a running joke my partner and I had about a previous relationship that ended disastrously. Areas in the city had become locations added to a list of blocked sites – streets that I wouldn’t walk down because of unhappy associations, or places to walk past where I would cross the street. A kind of personal, internal superstition for warding off the devil; making the sign of the evil eye, transformed into walking a sigil of avoidance on the street.

I hadn’t been sure how to translate this into art, and initially I wrote a text piece and mixtape for the now sadly defunct Gated Canal Community website. But that didn’t feel like enough. My friend Jonny had approached me about doing something with film for Repeater Books – a medium I had never worked with before – and slowly the germ of an idea started to form. At the same time, I went to an open studios that a work colleague was taking part in. In one of the studios, there was a canvas painted with an incredibly detailed portrait of Glasgow’s skyline, seemingly from an impossible vantage point. What struck me was that several building and areas had been greyed out, as if masks had been applied to them. I asked the artist if he had done this because those buildings and locations had similarly bad associations to my own blocklist of Glasgow points, and, rather more prosaically, he corrected me and showed that he actually just hadn’t finished the painting yet. But the idea was solidified – what if we psychologically, and, by extension, visually, could block these places out completely? The rest of the film then immediately fell into place, via computer manipulation of those 30 minute visits around the city and the voice of my amazing friend and collaborator Rachel Robinson.

How do you know when a piece is complete?
As I get older, the answer is increasingly never. Expanding out initial artworks into including the source material, inspirations, rework and remixing the original into something new to go alongside means that the ultimate, infinite goal – creating the perfect embodiment of an initial idea – gets ever closer. Like in Synecdoche, New York the endpoint is obsessively building something much vaster the original to reflect (like a fractal) the singular in a repeating, expanding whole. 

As I’ve done with several of the small books published via my No Roof Only Sky press, – where I added physical ‘appendixes’ of supporting material, film, etc. to be situated in a gallery setting – Blocklist here expands outwards from the screen via film stills and test shots; simulacra of items from the film and the original mixtape presented via a sculpture. Ideally, the next stage up will be presenting the City of Glasgow itself viewed through my eyes directly as the ultimate iteration – but that might take a little while to realise.

Which artists inspire you? Are there non-artistic influences such as literature or music that impact your work?
Blocklist was inspired by David Keenan, May Miles Thomas, Chris Marker, Oren Ambarchi, old Shep Pettibone remixes, Mika Vainio, Iain Sinclair, and Max Ernst.

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?
Alongside some live performances and djing over the summer, my next project is also Glasgow-focused – The Bell The Fish The Tree is a series of 6 audio works, each focusing on a hill in the city, beginning with Sighthill, and exploring it via fictional and non-fictional spoken word, field recordings from the area, and music created via the recordings. This will eventually show up on a new radio platform but the first episode will be broadcast as part of Radiophrenia 2026.

Find out more about Ruaridh’s work on Instagram or his website. Melting Point runs at Six Foot Gallery until Thursday 9th July.