‘Familiars’ and ‘Silk Graves’ at PAPER – interview with Ruby Tingle and Left Winter

Jo Manby

On show until 6 August 2022, PAPER devotes its two current exhibitions – offering perspectives on natural and unnatural histories – to A Modest Show, collateral artist-led programme to British Art Show 9. Ruby Tingle, Manchester based audio-visual artist represented by PAPER Gallery and No Such Thing Records, presents her sensory, immersive realm of ‘Familiars’ in the main space. Exquisite collages are steeped in a liquid soundtrack and a perfumed installation of lilies, waterweeds and plastic amphibians. Left Winter, a cross-disciplinary artist and composer signed to No Such Thing Records and based in Manchester and Berlin, exhibits ‘Silk Graves’ in PAPER2. A new body of work exhumes photographic plates from Winter’s past and resurrects them in the form of delicate, elusive Hahnemühle metallic prints that depict parts of insects caught in gossamer webs. In this three-way interview, Tingle and Winter discuss the proximity of life and art and the journeys on which their work has taken them.

Jo Manby: What first inspired you to incorporate the idea of ‘an unnatural history’ into your work? And have your personas and self-invented mythologies become inseparable from your life as you live it on a day-to-day basis?

Ruby Tingle: Unnatural history is something that’s fascinated me from a young age – when I was little I was obsessed with ‘fantasy creatures’ and as I’ve got older, exploring the gap between how the natural world is documented and what is unknown to science up till that point has been more of a consideration. There’s so much magic and wonderment already ingrained in natural history, but my imagination always takes me elsewhere because of that deep rooted love of monsters and myth. The personas I present and explore in my work are just parts of myself that I think I express in a more concentrated form for each performance or project – I don’t think there’s ever been much separation – almost none at all! All my work is autobiographical. I spend the majority of my time in swamp environments and nature, pretty much always in ballgowns covered in mud and looking for various things or animals of intrigue – and all of this is a desire, a need, and so my work and self are one reflecting back on another. 

Jo Manby: What came first, involvement in sound and music, or making art, or have the two always gone hand in hand with you?

Left Winter: Making art very much came first. Whilst I’ve been fortunate to have been around music in some form or another for the majority of my life, I hadn’t made any music until 2018. Art in graphic, or predominantly photographic form, I have been very involved in. I can trace my influences early. My father, and on his side my grandfather and uncles were all photographers but were also extremely scientific in a much wider manner. My initial influences, including in music (my dad was an accomplished musician), absolutely stem from them. Early memories of rare objects, electronics, blinking red bulbs and dismantled watches and radios, welding kits and metal detectors, bottles of Mercury, ribbons of Magnesium and various other elements of the Periodic Table in their raw format were abundantly scattered in garages and spare rooms of pretty much each house I visited.  

JM: The persona you create is fascinating and unique. What kinds of precedence are there for what you are doing with your work? Or would you say that your USP is your originality?

RT: I don’t think I've ever seen it as a USP or originality necessarily – because it’s so natural to me to present myself and music or art the way I do. There is an element of ideas or conversations that I want to generate through expression; I think it all comes down to the nature of collage whether that’s arranging forms and sounds or myself in a morning. If I’ve seen a colour palette or idea in nature or a book or a film the night before it tends to inform what I do with my hair and dress the next day, and I take simple pleasure in this, but it’s never effort for me because I think I have such a strong link between my internal and external worlds. 

JM: Being signed to No Such Thing, how important is collaboration to your practice, both as an artist and a musician? 

LW: I actually tend to work alone when I create. In fact, the images, or negatives more to the point, have been laying in a state of un-care for a very long time – twenty years, in fact, not by design but by an idiosyncrasy, I guess. I love the impact that time has had on them, accumulating dust, scratches and hair. I still have rolls of film yet to be processed. A can of latent images, trapped moments in time in which I have no idea what is inside, but that are gradually taking in light day by day, is thoroughly interesting.  I’ll process them soon, I suppose, but it’s an isolated process for me.   

JM: On a practical note, I wondered where some of your footage comes from. Do you take the underwater film for example? Do you generate your own photographic material for the collages, or do you use found imagery?

RT: It’s a mixture of both – film wise I combine footage I take and animation with my cut out forms, and I’m always recording natural sound to manipulate as part of my songs and create an environment for them to sit in. My works on paper are a combination of found image fragments, other materials like reptile skin and then manipulation of specialist paper surface itself, especially ones that have fabric elements so they can become very textural and mirror the habitats that inspire me. The 3D elements of my installations are usually all bought or found objects – the nature of my practice means whatever I’m focused on at the time acts as a kind of blinker to home in on colours, textures, forms and sounds – it’s a very focused collecting and sorting process that eventually emerges as a body of work. I’ve always wanted to ‘get inside’ pictures, and so I take apart an assortment of visual and audible ones I come across and then restructure this in a large scale as an exhibition – it means I can literally get inside it and place myself inside a vision to live out these fantasies or re-imaginings of past moments. 

JM: How do your collaborations come about? What’s the spark that puts a project into motion?

LW: Well, the timing. If it weren’t for Ruby, Silk Graves wouldn’t have happened. It actually un-nerves me a tiny bit to think they’d never be shown, and the music absolutely came second. Whilst half the work was there, the rest needed a door opening, and there you are, the processing began, the music writing followed because there was an outlet, an outlet I’m very grateful for. Before that, again were it not for Ruby, 48HNK wouldn’t have happened either. Almost the same as above, the work pretty much fully existed. I’d been isolated on the images and sounds for a few years before they were revealed at 48HNK - there is a large life story in them, but the door opened for them. I had a wonderful conversation with two people I met on the opening night, we talked briefly about a book I had found, was that a spark? I think so, I felt it. The book I found is a wonderful story and will remain latent for the moment. Who knows, it might end up staying on my shelf like it was found, abandoned but glanced at, but it came off the press in 1946!     

JM: Thinking of the beautiful collaborative Flora Victorious at Venice Biennale, to what extent is contemporary technology inspiring new ways for you to animate your self-portrayal, for example in tableaux, musical performance and immersive environments?

RT: Hugely – Flora Victorious was so immersive because of its collaborative nature in terms of communication, colour, dress and movement with Joe Mills, and the projection mapping animation by Raven Keating which animated the entire space. Creating an immersive space that can transport an audience is so important to me, and it’s easy to take for granted how swiftly we can do this with technology now. It’s also allowing a more fluid crossover between the music industry and arts as we can start to transform stage spaces and our bodies during musical performance – it heightens all the senses to present more of an experience than just appreciating a painting on a gallery wall or watching a live band. I think scent has become an enormous part of my practice since working with Steven Calver, a perfumer who worked with me for Lagoons and Familiars. Smell is such a powerful and emotive force and to support a body of work with this seems to have great impact on an audience's response to the work as a whole. 

JM: I love the implied fragility and ghostliness of Silk Graves as a body of work. How important to you is the potential of visual images to tell stories, construct fables, fabricate new and previously unseen worlds?

LW: Thank you! Creating visual (lens-based) images was the only way I knew how to document what I wanted. In fact, they were photographic because it was essentially the only way for me. Typography followed, but as student peers leapt to computers, I ran the other way to the dark room. Whether they’re images of buildings designed by the architects I adore or the dark plight of people (my first piece of music I created) I document the narrative alone. 

If I were to provide an example, I almost knew what I wanted. I searched out a harsh winter, but I didn’t know what a night train journey to Eastern Europe would actually reveal, for instance, and so it’s odd, the more I consider it, the less I believe they are stories of any interest. It was on the journey where I created some of the images for my first exhibition. The results of my work are certainly my story of my life, and whilst not always, I often wrestle with the idea that stories must be added. They don’t. They just are. I now write a musical narrative to them in the same way as using light waves to capture images and scenes, I guess. 

JM: Referring to the Lagoons project at Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, are the possibilities inherent in the incorporation of historic artefacts and living organisms into these new technologies inspiring in themselves?

RT: Yes definitely – my practice is so responsive and museum collections in particular have always been a huge inspiration to me. It’s a way of breathing new life and stories into dead, preserved objects and looking at them in a new way. In Lagoons I wanted to present parts of their collection alongside my works seamlessly and without explanation, so their objects and mine become one and the same to blur the lines of history and a reimagined ‘unnatural’ history which I’m portraying in my images. This was one of the most exciting parts of the project, I spent hours looking through archival naturalist notes and was presented with a huge amount of curious and amazing artefacts to use. Because I’d researched a very specific vein of ethno-herpetology and its links to the curious or monstrous, I selected quite specific items to highlight, which again echoes the nature of my practice and felt similar to being in the studio. Having the opportunity to work so closely with museum collections and entwine them in a contemporary setting with media such as film, sculpture, scent and performance is hugely inspiring and to me, makes the work whole. 

JM: Are you influenced by the concept of Vanitas, or reminders of mortality? Are you, like Ruby, involved in a form of mythmaking?

LW: I can’t speak for Ruby, of course, but yes, I am certainly drawn to mortality, but I don’t wish to explore Vanitas or myth or stories of the supernatural, these are not of high interest or inspiration to me. Thinking about it, for me it’s an implied, subtle feeling of mortality that you can communicate that captures me.  

JM: I wondered whether in the blurring of the boundaries between scientific ‘fact’ and fabricated myth, you have discovered new ways of highlighting/communicating important contemporary issues (Thinking of how the project involved environmental organisations such as Turtle Survival Alliance)? If this is the case, in what ways does this add value to your work as an artist and performer?

RT: I’m the opposite to Left Winter in that sense and I’m obsessed with myths and the supernatural! but I’m equally fascinated by fact, science and how the two worlds work together. So much of the survival of interest in some of my favourite animals – amphibians and reptiles, is down to storytelling and legend that has carried their links to the curious through centuries to the present day. And this works hand in hand with conservation efforts to protect their future. I think storytelling will always be the most important learning tool for humans; if I can use my art to inspire narrative and also to create a platform for conversations around protecting nature through this kind of collaboration, then I feel like I’m pushing that idea of storytelling and hopefully igniting an interest in subjects beyond the arts as a result. 

JM: What project are you focusing on next?

LW: I’m working on a series of very simple graphic pieces at the moment around the reflection of sounds. The medium is currently print, but additionally represented is music, as are some other elements of immersive visual and audible representations.

Ruby Tingle’s soundtrack to ‘Familiars’ is released on No Such Thing on 1 July 2022. Listen to it here

Ruby Tingle has a solo show in 2023 at the Whitaker, Rossendale and will be releasing her next EP in May next year on No Such Thing.

Left Winter’s music for the exhibition, ‘Silk Graves’ will be released as a single on 10 June 2022. Listen to Left Winter here

A Modest Evening: Friday 5th August from 8pm till late

PAPER, in collaboration with independent record label No Such Thing, present an evening of art, music, food and drink from artist/musicians Ruby Tingle and Left Winter in order to welcome Berlin gallery, Axel Obiger to Manchester, as they prepare for their exhibition as part of A Modest Show at PAPER. Ruby Tingle and Left Winter will perform their singles at the event, which takes place at Soup Kitchen on Friday 5th August with complimentary food and drink. The event will be ticketed.

https://www.amodestshow.com/programme/a-modest-evening-with-ruby-tingle