Sue Ridge Portfolio

The project engaged researchers and their teachers within the Centre for Craniofacial & Regenerative Biology, encouraging them to look at their cutting edge research in a different way. Art was used as a catalyst to enrich the process and to enable a visual narrative, enabling the researchers to tell their story.

Cornice

Inspired by the various processes, descriptions and laboratory tours by the students and staff. The boxes of eggs in the lab spaces showed a recognisable everyday object within the laboratory environment. I am interested in creating work which gently domesticates the hospital spaces e.g. corridors. The eggs recalled egg and dart cornices in interiors. The patient in the dental chair focuses their attention on the ceiling and walls as a diversion to the procedures.

 The ‘Egg & Dart with Dentil’ cornice plays with this looking at the walls, the addition of gold orthodontic traction chains reference the dental process for impacted incisors. The Dentil Moulding is composed of tooth shaped blocks and was first used in Ancient Geek and Roman Architecture when the blocks were carved into the stone of buildings. The plaster cornice will be painted in colours used in dental models. The egg sections painted realistically e.g. different tones of brown as opposed to a repeat pattern colouring identifying individuality. 

Wallpaper 200cm  X 60cm

The wallpaper again inspired by the dental patient’s gaze from the chair or waiting room. The pattern created from various references to dentistry. Below the dado line is overlaid pattern with of dental instruments and flowers looking at the relationship of the delicacy of teeth with flowers. The dado is made from images of eggs used in the labs. The background pattern above the dado is created from a cell image from a PHD student, overlaid are images of cloves. Additional images of parrotfish x-rays and Tooth Rings from The Gordon Museum. The skirting pattern is created from macro images from a student. 

‘Interventions & Interruptions’ will open on September 26th.  This exhibition will feature the work of four artists whose divergent individual practices, ranging from documentary photography to book- making, installation and still life, are all highly experimental. The work on display will include an installation by Tom Pope that relies on motion-sensitive mechanisms to create images that essentially document the presence of the audience; Sue Ridge’s ethereal x-ray inventories of institutional archives; Aletheia Casey’s documentary series that, unusually for the genre, incorporates images made from heavily manipulated negatives; and Katie Bret Day’s experimental book, 'Lacuna'.

The Embroidered Minds project is  a collaboration between writers, artists, designers, doctors and academics, is ongoing.

Embroidered Minds is at      www.embroideredminds.co.uk

My starting point was the notion that William Morris had a Secret Sketchbook.

I further became interested in Victorian attitudes to women, hysteria, illness and emotional states, as well as aphasia and contemporary treatments for neurological conditions - EEG and X -ray.

Wall paper and its production is central to much of this collection: the dyes (arsenic) techniques, glitch related to malfunction and disorderly patterns, textile print tables which leave the historical marks of early prints.

My first wallpaper was developed from a series of commissions at Forty Hall in 2004. Inspired by William Morris designs, I made wallpaper for the cleaners cupboard, a place usually devoid of pattern. Also a wallpaper inspired by the ghosts of Forty Hall.

This set of works consists of a series of images variously made as printed

wallpapers, digital transparencies and print images. Some of this work is integrated into collages created by Andrew and Leslie which appear in the “Embroidered Minds of the Morris Women a novel part 1.

Exhibitions:

• Seizure, Aphasia and Flower wallpapers

Embroidered minds exhibition at the UCL Institute of Neurology Archive and

Library

• Seizure, Aphasia wallpapers Neo Print Prize 2016 Bolton UK

• Seizure, Aphasia wallpapers Chelsea College of Arts Staff Show 2016 & 2017

Articles

Printmaking Today Magazine, Autumn 2016 ‘Wall in the Mind ‘ interview Birkbeck Magazine - Teaching and Learning – Embroidered Minds article by Professor Marjorie Lorch Jan 2017

Further information about the project

www.embroideredminds-epilepsygarden.org.uk

X-Ray Archive, a research project which brings together scientific photography and selected objects from UAL’s Archives and Special Collections. The project utilises specialist x-ray technology as a starting point in generating imagery which both reveals new information about each object’s material content, and repositions its meaning into other, allusive narratives. A central outcome is the creation of an exhibition intended to tour all UAL sites, aimed at expanding UAL’s constituents’ knowledge of the potentials of its archives and collections, and involving UAL postgraduate students in its design and installation.

‘The archive is popularly conceived as a space where things are hidden in a state of stasis, imbued with secrecy, mystery and power. Archives are seen as rows of boxes and shelves, impenetrable without the codex which unlocks their arrangement and locations.’[i]

[i] Breakell. Sue  Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive , Tate Papers, Tate’s Online Research Journal

An exhibition of X-ray artworks created from a residency with the six Archives & Special Collections Centres at the University of the Arts, London.

Central Saint Martins Museums and Study Collection Windows Gallery , Granary Building, Kings Cross London N1.

June 28th-30th July 2018

Working with x-ray analogue waste and mistakes

The selected images are part of an ongoing series using cyanotype processes and glass objects. The images were created in London in low winter sunlight. The initial cyanotype is created using glass prisms. Then after processing the print the prisms are laid back onto the print creating different patterns and shadows as the sunlight changed creating endless compositions. The print was then photographed to capture one moment of the light and only exists as a living artwork and digital file. Some of the images are overlaid composites which create new palimpsest images. These create a connection to early analogue and current digital processes.

 Goethe stated that colour was not simply a scientific measurement, but a subjective experience perceived differently by the viewer. I am trying to create new complex abstracted images that question image making and the ethereal qualities of sunlight.

UNBOXED CYANOTYPES

The Unboxed series references Unboxing Stuff on YouTube -which is the process of unpacking consumer goods - high tech e.g. iPhones. My version creating Unboxed Cyanotypes reverses this process by creating a cyanotype box and adding my own transparent objects. Then totally collapsing and deconstructing the box when washing the cyanotype solution in water, using the flattened box as a framing device. Flattening the box and showing its basic layered structure, changes the appearance of a 3D object to 2D.

Digital print images from various hospital and museum commissions.

Hazard in Place is part of an ongoing series looking at everyday hazard situations in the public domain. Red and white tape has become ubiquitous in the urban environment and often evokes a creative response from the user and the installer.

Hazard tape installations create borders, they create a line which says do not enter. Red and white tape signifies danger, do not cross, yellow and black tape signifies caution, beware. A hazard tape situation can denote ownership, do not touch, this is my territory. Leftover tape situations can be subtly banal confusing the viewer, they are part of our everyday life creating borders and barriers.

• Danger  

• Do not enter     

• Watch your step  

• Keep clear 

• Beware

• Men at work

All images taken on my iPhone