Rogue Pop-up Gallery

Ruth Waller – Familiar Things And Unfamiliar Places

Opening: Saturday 2nd May 2026
Exhibition Dates: 29 Apr - 24 May
Mon-Tues: CLOSED
Wed-Sat: 11am-6pm
Sun: 11am-5pm

Location:

130 Regent Street Redfern

Featuring:

Familiar things and unfamiliar places

“Denying still life is tantamount to confessing that one doesn’t understand painting, since it is through still life that painting reveals its constitution, its essence.”

Henri de Pruraux, French painter living in Florence, 1911.

Many of the paintings in this exhibition are described as “thebaides”, a reference to the title of a painting by Gherardo di Jacopo Starnina dated 1410. This markedly horizontal work offers a bird’s eye view of scenes from monastic life in a rocky landscape. This and other similar images of the time were likely inspired by stories of the Desert Fathers, early Christian hermits and ascetics living in a wilderness region of Egypt known then as Thebaid.

In contemplating these votive images Ruth Waller has described painting itself as her place of retreat and reclusion. Just as the desert was a place of withdrawal and the model for Christian monasticism so, for many artists, the studio is a place of inner stillness, freed from the vicissitudes of daily life.

Painters, who more often than not work alone, are no strangers to solitude and contemplative states of mind. The “inner life” is often described in spatial metaphors and these small paintings are indeed suggestive of landscapes. Their narrow height and marked breadth bring to mind panoramas, those distant landscapes often associated with the hungry eye of colonialism.

These landscapes, however, have an intimacy and immediacy that is shared by all the works in this exhibition due in no small part to an overt materiality. Ruth has chosen to paint on hessian supports (both stretched and unstretched), the open weave of which brings the dialogue between image and object to the fore. The muted tone and intense colours of the matt acrylic paint lends a quietude to compositions, occasionally punctuated by iridescent pigments, a faint echo of the gold leaf used in early Christian works.

In the still life paintings the point of view shifts to eye-level, registering the horizontality of the table top. The procession of overlapping vessels – jugs, bowls, urns, cups – suggests the unfolding of a timeless simultaneity between the archaic and prosaic in the nature of things “to hand”. The ghosts of Greek vases appear in concert with echoes of mid-century Modernism, perhaps a reminder of the wall paper and textiles of Ruth’s childhood and her interest in the domestic aspects of Bloomsbury painters’ wall decorations.

Understated titles like “Vessels with pale coral highlights” reduce associative interpretations and emphasise the formal aspects of the work, a reminder of the significance of still life in the development of Abstraction. These compositions are also meditations on “decoration” as a devalued aspect of painting, the titles suggesting a poetics of colour – “milky green”, “dark mustard”, “lemon and grey”, “pink and ultra blue”, a reminder of the ancient connection between painting and poetry.

Episodes of Fate I and II present something of a coda to the series, once again suggesting a timeless unfolding and offering strangely contemporary visions of Purgatory. Generalised figures drawn from scenes of Judgement in Renaissance paintings are tossed on colourful currents of events, humanity caught between Heaven and Hell in the here and now.

These small paintings, strangely reminiscent of the banners and flags of Medieval times, are reminders of the events and forces that have always tested humanity. In this sense Ruth Waller’s paintings are a timely reminder that the uncertainty of current events is, in fact, a perpetual feature of human experience.

Jude Rae

2026

Early Thebaide – Going Horizontal
acrylic on hessian (stretched)
30 x 122cm
2026