Ruth Watson
For over twenty years Ruth Watson has used the world map as a basis for making art. Unlike many artists using map imagery, she does not use the map or globe as a "given" or "found object" but instead, investigates its structure?the map projection itself.
Watson is looking for projections that can challenge the way we usually represent the world and transform their meanings further via the use of materials, ranging from photographs of the surface of a tongue (a lingua geographica) to chocolate wrapping paper or pink plastic shopping bags. Her maps have been stretched and distorted, moulded into heart shapes, and printed onto silken dresses. Globes have been made from animal tissue or beautifully executed in hand blown glass. Lost Worlds, a new series of drawings, use uncommon map projections as their basis. Rendered on heavy paper then erased, the image of something that once existed no longer does, the only remnants are embedded in the paper.
Watson has had 25 solo exhibitions since 1987, in New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the USA. These include Paradise Now? Asia Society Museum, New York, 2004 and The World Over, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1996. She has also been included in two Australian survey exhibitions, Living Here Now: Art and Politics, 1999 and Between Art and Nature, 1997, and the 9th Sydney Biennale, The Boundary Rider, 1992. Watson will be exhibiting a large-scale floor installation at Two Rooms in September 2007.
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