Ruth Babington is a Glasgow based artist and a recent graduate from the Glasgow School of Art. Her work reflects and explores the properties of colour, with the aim to disorder compositions of images that already exist into a new and structured system. What is revealed during this process is a weaving together of what you expect to see and what you did not. Her focus is on how colours interact with each other in creating a new, rhythmic image that celebrates the intricacies of colour relationships rooted in traditional and contemporary colour theories. This relationship with colour stems from her experience with hearing loss and the peace found in controlling her visual sense, where sound is illustrated and not heard. This system she has created allows for a visual focus and a personal physical immersion into the act of painting where comfort is found in repetition of a physical and mindful act. Where the spirit can be fulfilled in a communication of colour alone.

Thanks for being with us, Ruth. Can you tell us what your earliest memory of being interested in art is?
I can always remember having a very strong vision of what I wanted things to look like and how I could make it happen. Like many artists I’m sure, I was always colouring from a very young age. If I wasn’t colouring I was searching for a craft I could do, and on really good days making a princess castle out of a cardboard box. One of my favourite memories of making from a young age was during the warmer months in my great aunts garden me and my Mum would go about the garden collecting pretty things like petals, pebbles and small sticks, she’d sit me down on a square stone on a path through the garden and i’d make a picture out of the found things. 

Who or what inspires you? How do you interact with your inspirations?
I find a lot of my inspiration in my research. I fell in love with the intricacies of colour theory during my studies and have spent a lot of that time learning about its history and development. Colour theory has such a vast history, starting as far back as Aristotle and developing into scientific, cultural, and spiritualistic avenues. My own practice for painting  has developed from exercises I was doing from Josef Albers book ‘Interaction of Colour’. I find the information often sparks ideas and working with new theories will push my ideas further.

What excites you about your work? Are there particular themes that run through your practice that you’re particularly passionate about?
Colour is at the heart of my practice, it’s constantly confounding in nature and you never really know what it will show you. It can be incredibly frustrating, but it can also be incredibly exciting when you get it right. At the most basic level, the three principles of art are line, form and colour. Line and form for me have never ignited a strong feeling, when I look at something and feel it, I always feel the colour not the shape. Colour is pure energy, it’s alive, and I think when looking into a deep colourful image you can see and feel something a lot more spiritual or physical than you can with line and form. Colour is itself the most exciting artistic principle for me, it holds so much potential to show you something you cannot see.  

Tell us about your creative process – has your time at art school impacted your work or methods?
During my time at art school I created a very particular system for making art. Having a structure and a system of creation I find soothes and directs my mind so that I can work and develop my passion for colour with a direction. The system itself is a distortion process of taking a source image, breaking it down into a grid and isolating its colours. I then reorder the colours into a grid of circular forms based on colour principle exercises that I practice from The Interaction of Colour by Josef Albers. This making process was fine tuned and developed a lot while at art school and it has come with me in my practice as I continue to paint, and I think it will be at the center of the way I make for a long time. In a sense I have developed a system in which I can funnel all of my ideas and passion into.

How do you overcome creative blocks?
My Dad always says to me, that inspiration will come but it has to find you working. The only way to overcome the block is to work through it. The best thing I created for myself in my practice is a set of rules that provides a means of working, and I always recommend this to people when they get stuck as it allows you to keep going until the inspiration really finds you. The main thing is to be kind to yourself, keep working, keep researching, follow leads even if you’re not convinced, and let it go if it doesn’t lead anywhere.

Now that you’ve graduated, what advice would you give to someone just starting at art school?
The most important thing I learned at art school is the importance of criticism. Learning to take it not as an insult but as a tool is the best thing you can do for yourself and your art. It either helps you to grow out of something that you don’t know isn’t working, shows you something you couldn’t see that may transform your work, or most importantly, it helps you learn how to cement your own beliefs. How to defend what you do and fight for your practice. If you believe in what you do and can defend it to even the harshest critic, often everyone else will believe in it too.

Find out more about Ruth’s work on Instagram or on her website. Ruth’s work is on display as part of Starter Pack, running at Six Foot Gallery until from Thursday the 13th August until Thursday the 27th of August.