Ruth Waters works with film, sound, animation, text and installation. Her practice explores the ways late capitalist networked society impacts our levels of anxiety.
Ruth Waters works with film, sound, animation, text and installation. Her practice explores the ways late capitalist networked society impacts both our levels of anxiety and our ability to imagine an alternative. She conducts extensive research for her projects, often online, where genres, time zones, generations, political struggles and reality TV exist simultaneously. Taking advantage of this open source material and its malleability; writing scripts and producing films which combine found footage with acted scenes. Her work offers critique of the murky emerging uncertainties of our digital era using dark humour and satire.
Ruth Waters holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. Recent shows include Frequency of Magic, 아웃사이트 out_sight, Seoul, South Korea (2019); Push Your Luck, Island, Brussels, Belgium (2019); All About You, Koppel Project Hive, London, UK (2019); The 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow (2018); White Shadows at Wumin Art Center, Cheongju, South Korea (2018); Seep at Peer Gallery, London (2017) and Cacotopia at Annka Kultys Gallery, London (2017). She was the recipient of the Goldsmiths MFA Studio Award 2016 including a grant and a year residency at Acme Studios.
Emotion Over Raisin
HD Video / 15:54 min / 2019
‘Emotion Over Raisin’ reconstructs a group therapy session, focussing on mindfulness meditation. Participants in the 8 week program are asked to stare at and then eat a raisin. The film both questions the efficacy of the exercise, but ultimately highlights the need for the seemingly pointless in a society where we are constantly forced to be ‘switched on’.
Redsky66
HD Video / 17:04 min / 2017
For her film ‘Redsky66’, Waters spent six months conducting interviews with people suffering from severe phobias. Culminating in a scripted work that tells the story of a man who has Apeirophobia (fear of eternity) and what happens when he sends a viral tweet. It draws on her own experience of having an extreme phobia and examines how such anxiety disorders are amplified in the digital age.