Ruth Calland in her studio (copyright: Ruth Philo)

A Geography of Colour: Ruth Calland

This month Ruth Philo talks with Contemporary British Painting member Ruth Calland, a painter and also a Jungian analyst, living and working in London.



Emergence and attunement to what is emergent, are the experiences that engage her. She has a deep interest in alchemy, which provides a framework for how she thinks about painting as process. She will often utilise two different points of reference and see them as creating an interactive field, within which she operates in order to investigate their relationship. She has a longstanding interest in gender, and her exploration of gender fluidity in her participative performance project Carnival of Souls took place across the E17 Arts Festival and the Folkestone Triennial in 2013. She presented this work at the conference ‘Alchemy: Exploring Metaphorical Transformations and Arts-Based Research’ at Oxford University in 2023.

In the pandemic she was inspired by the early vampire film Nosferatu, with its monochrome landscapes, haunted by anxiety about infection by the supernatural other. At this time she also began researching trans experiences of being feared and othered, discussed by creators on TikTok. Her current work uses stills from these videos to amplify and celebrate trans voices, using high key colour to celebrate their cultural emergence from the shadows, and a redefinition of what it means to be natural, or true to nature.

Ruth is a member of Contemporary British Painting and has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Transition Gallery, Flowers East, Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery, Vestry House Museum, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, and the Dulwich Festival. She has curated shows for APT, Walthamstow Wetlands, and Salthouse Gallery. She was included in the Made In Britain, 80 Painters of the 21st Century, at Yantai Museum, Nanjing and Tianjin in China, and Gdansk, Poland in 2019; she was selected for the New Contemporaries at the ICA and Bluecoat Galleries, was a prize-winner at Southwark Gallery Open, Painting Fellow at Gloucester Art College, a Rome Scholar runner up, Boise Travelling Scholarship winner, and included twice in the Marmite Prize for Painting. In 2022 she was artist in residence atPasture Project Space, Sudbury andrecently a finalist at the Artworks Open 2023, (Barbican Arts Trust). She lectures and writes on creative processes within Jungian psychoanalysis and in 2018 won the Fordham Prize for her paper ‘Race, Power and Intimacy’.

Listen here:
CBP website: https://www.contemporarybritis...
Ruth Philo website: https://www.ruthphilo.co.uk/a-...



Ruth Calland: Self-sacrifice Scene, oil on paper on canvas, 122cm x 183cm, 2023 (copyright: Ruth Calland)