Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Ruby Stewart
My practice is a means to think about and investigate social structures, hierarchies, free will, gender theory, labour and relationships. Using whatever discipline or medium that makes the most sense at the time to use to materialise ineffable thoughts.
Recent work explores the phenomena of Home-gyms. For more context, r/homegym on Reddit provides an interesting documentation of these spaces. Often containing customised banners, joe blog’s gym or self-ordering texts, work harder, take no days off, no pain no gain, don’t weaken, no excuses. Additionally, investigating those who go to the lengths of building, welding, painting and upholstering the equipment themselves and documenting it via YouTube tutorials.
My benches are as much gym benches as they are gallery benches. An area of rest, serenity and work.
The partition walls that once separated studio spaces, now gallery walls, are liberated into both an architectural drawing desk and a doorway fitted with a pull up bar. I think about these partition walls a lot. How they try to go unnoticed and how easy it is to see them as a given in art schools. Dividing the much contested ‘spaces’, sometimes providing moments of privacy or isolation. Stow College’s white maze.
Rounders
Rounders is an unofficial sport. It is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams. Rounders is a striking and fielding team game that involves hitting a small, hard, leather-cased ball with a wooden, plastic, or metal bat that has a rounded end. The players score by running around the four bases on the field.
Played in England since Tudor times, it is referenced in 1744 in the children’s book A Little Pretty Pocket-Book where it was called Base-Ball. The name baseball was superseded by the name rounders in England, while other modifications of the game played elsewhere retained the name baseball. The game is popular among British and Irish school children, particularly among girls. As of 2015, rounders is played by seven million children in the UK.
Gameplay centres on a number of innings, in which teams alternate at batting and fielding. Points (known as ’rounders’) are scored by the batting team when one of their players completes a circuit past four bases without being put ‘out’. The batter must strike at a good ball and attempt to run a rounder in an anti-clockwise direction around the first, second, and third base and home to the fourth, though they may stay at any of the first three. A batter is out if the ball is caught; if the base to which they are running is touched with the ball; or if, while running, they are touched with the ball by a fielder.
