Karin Ruggaber

Language does not attach itself comfortably to Karin Ruggaber’s work. Single words, or at most an evocative phrase, may hover as an analogous sensibility, but she is unconcerned with representing something that an explanation or description can be bolted on to. Despite immediate, material consistencies between pieces, Ruggaber seems to pursue a floating agenda. One piece may be passionately disjunctive or coolly resistant to any reference outside itself, while another may be frivolously ornamental or representational to the point of mimicry.

An overview of Ruggaber’s work may seem to reveal a contradictory practice, but these oscillations between art’s ways of referring to the real world and to itself are indicators of the same inquiry. Operating very much from the interior of art, Ruggaber nudges around its perimeter, testing how pliable or porous or brittle it is. She is assessing how far the decorative or the functional can be taken before transgressing the accepted threshold. A table made of plywood and exhibited in the 1998 British exhibition of recent graduates, ‘New Contemporaries’, for example, appeared so utilitarian as to be invisible as art – people absently leant against it and plonked their bags and beer bottles on it. Conversely, in the recent Art Now installation at Tate Britain (2006), fabric and concrete reliefs stud the wall like unapologetic adornments, shamelessly absorbed by their own aesthetic and tactile appeal. Ruggaber sets up numerous contrasts, like poles between which to work, studiously avoiding the hazy regions in between by bringing together or setting at counterpoint the decorative and the functional, hard and soft, formal and representational.

Ruggaber does not construct a privileged point of surveillance when she embarks on a two- or three-dimensional art work. An arrangement of her cartoony blob-shaped tiles, for instance, is not designed to fill an outline; instead, the edge of one element implies the form of the next, and that of the next and the next until an end-point is intuitively reached. A piece, or a collation of pieces, forms like crystals, growing out of and hermeneutically forming itself. Aspects of display take their cues from architecture and urban adornment, drawing out connotations of the egalitarianism of the façade. But the controlling hand of the painter also informs these arrangements. Incorrect perspective, the clumsy insinuation of backgrounds and the absolute construction of space are attractively mischievous when transcribed into three dimensions. This may explain Ruggaber’s often contrary sense of imbalance and discord in an installation – the resolute one-sidedness of her Art Now installation, for instance.

Occasionally elements more directly adopt the vernacular of architecture or some other functional structure, but this reference point is generally a blind alley, a formal point of departure with no intended pictorial logic. Fence (2002) affects a representational mode – indeed, it looks like a wooden fence. But it is the sculptural qualities of a fence that have been isolated and reconfigured in the gallery: its tendency to barricade, create angles and connections. Rather than the appearance of a fence exported from the landscape and reiterated in a figurative work, Ruggaber is working from within art, sucking the world of formal references through the grill of her materials.

Although language sits uneasily with the work, there is a material syntax that governs Ruggaber’s practice, which is a symptom of her desire to categorize and order. Polar extremes are sought among fabrics and aggregate compounds, the lumpy and the smooth, the raw and the cooked brought into proximity. Colour combinations force the tweedy and practical into compliance with the acidic and dynamic; floppy fabric is contrasted with authoritative concrete. Often wall displays of folded and pinned aertex, felt, printed cottons and slippery nylons alongside or embedded within hand-mixed crusts of concrete, plaster and clay are arranged as if expressing a typological progression or categorization. A sparse, often museological display implies careful decisions and a somewhat perversely authorial impulse.

More recently Ruggaber has been introducing photographs into the work. In her exhibition at greengrassi, London, in 2005, ‘mega-super military style’, a number of fabric and concrete relief and floor pieces were augmented by two photographs of food being cooked in an obviously smart restaurant kitchen. Contrary to our impulse, we are to disassociate the images from their social context – here food is a real-world projection of Ruggaber’s studio-based propositions: a meal is a composite object that orchestrates textures and tastes using logic and insight. Similarly her photographic research on architecture and public space, particularly in the clamour of Istanbul, is published in books devoid of explicatory text. Like the gallery installations, these books represent arrested moments of the social whirl and the experience of its tactile qualities. Although this is inciting an inappropriate verbosity, it could be said that they are fragmentary encyclopaedic entries of non-verbal experiences.