AKINCI is proud to present a solo exhibition by Ruby Swinney (b. 1992), a South African painter who works primarily in oil on silk and oil on tracing paper. Using vibrant monochrome colours, her work ascends into a parallel world where strangely dark and mysterious figures inhabit timeless landscapes. Swinney’s paintings echo our present uncertainties and our longing for a vanishing natural world that is growing darker and more unfamiliar.
The idea for this exhibition began with a sense of displacement. Earlier this year, Ruby Swinney moved to London. The relocation caused a profound rupture in the artist’s life. The paintings in this show were painted, prior to the move, in the bright, natural light of the artist’s Cape Town studio. The landscapes they represent are specific to this world, which now exists only in her memory.
The title, Amid The Alien Corn, is taken from John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. In the poem, the nightingale is a strange contradictory presence, both innocent and associated with death. Keats in a flight of fancy, imagines the bird’s other-worldly song heard by the Biblical character of Ruth, the lonely Moabite woman displaced from home in a foreign land. It is from this sympathetic depiction of Ruth that Swinney derives the title of this show.