I had the pleasure of meeting mixed media and contemporary artist Ruth Fox, and Steven Young with whom she collaborated, to discuss her most recent exhibition ‘A Most Awkward Divide.’
We met in Gallery 46 in Whitechapel, London, on the final day of her exhibition. After looking around the exhibition and being shown a few pieces by Ruth we went into the garden to talk about her work and body hunt campaign.
‘I’m looking at how we live online and how technology and science are kind of escalating to the point where it uses a lot of time out of our minds and we really don’t focus much on our bodies anymore. I think we are kind of losing sight of our individual physical identities and it’s affecting how we live.
Did you have a personal experience with the mind/body divide?
I think it’s what we all call stress really. When you’re on the laptop too much or working too much and you get a bit stressed and a bit anxious and you have this very, like, awkward feeling when you don’t spend enough time actually sitting and thinking about how it feels to be in your body. It’s the age of over information effecting us all.
I noticed one of your artworks is called the machine…
One of the main things that we all need to look at is, as a human species, we are very curious about what we can do with bodies and minds and what limits we can push them to. So, obviously being curious, scientists look into things like uploading our minds separately from our bodies. It’s great we’re looking at that but its not going to help our physical identities, it’s pushing us further away.
In terms of looking for a solution… have you found one?
I think there’s an element of people focusing more on being in their bodies. Also, I think it’s about understanding that we’ve all got very over complicated, and if we went back to a simpler, more basic way of living and working perhaps, then I think everyone would be a lot happier. But we are a species and we are going to probably, at some point, exhaust ourselves, overdo it, and maybe die out… I don’t know… we’ll see… it’s a bit morbid. The overall journey of the art is what I call a body hunt campaign, so its trying to find what we’ve lost physically.
You can follow Ruth on Instagram @ruth_fox and Steven @thythunderbird. This is an excerpt of our conversation, to hear the full interview go to www.mixcloud.com/insanityradio/stream/ or visit The Orbital online.