The Pinking

2014 / Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

The Pinking

When the sky is lit up with the pink shades of sunrise or sunset the world is awakened to the signal of day approaching or night falling. But if one had  just awoken they could  easily mix these two times of the day up and so feel a weightlessness under the sky. It takes time to reorient oneself and be grounded in time. Ruth E. Lyons's work touches on the liminal interlude between the pinking of the sky, the constellations of stars above, the breath and richness of landscapes underfoot and the depths of the earth andl underwater below us. She produces aquaculture structures which float against abstract backgrounds providing new islands of reality, architectural shapes which grow from the solid architecture of buildings- looking back on itself as if questioning the function of the origin. Works beckon technology to inform deserted islands or rely on a voice to instruct the viewer to experience the cosmic realm and our virtual selves within it. Within her work attention is drawn to the gravity of the atmosphere; by means of   watercolour paintings which talk of the depths of landscape, the femininity of the pinking of the sky and its profound charge as it unveils the distance and slowness of the earth. A portal is situated in the gallery- a mirrored, refraction of the space between the ceiling and floor, marked out with pink buoys signalling the division between the surface of water and the water chamber underneath. 

What we perceive to know about the breath of the universe, the knowable information from human discoveries is queried by the idea of the unknowable expanses in nature. Ruth E. Lyons suspends us in a weightless wondering of disorientation: an illusory world within the gallery space. 

Text by Aoife Tunney