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The High Window is pleased to welcome Ruth Egan as its new Resident Artis for 2025. The editor would also like to take this opportunity to thank Pauline Flynn for her many excellent contributions to the journal in this role last year. It has been a pleasure working with her and it is to be hoped that we will see more of her work in future. [DC].
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Ruth Egan is an Irish artist and poet originally from Limerick. She studied visual arts at fine art academy St Lucas in Brussels, Belgium, specialising in painting and printmaking. Currently based in Dublin, she has had solo exhibitions of her works in Ireland and Belgium. Her works have also featured in festivals around Ireland such as Ranelagh Arts Festival, Birr Vintage Festival, Galway Fringe Festival and Dingle’s Féile na Bealtaine, among others, and in journals Drawn to the Light and The Ogham Stone.
Her poetry has been published most recently in Drawn to the Light Press, Rathmines Writers Workshop anthology Beneath the Clock, The Passage Between and A New Ulster. ruthegan.weebly.com/
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Artist’s statement
The physical process of creating an artwork has always been at the centre of my practice where I am concerned with the interplay of colour, form and light dynamics in fashioning the finished work.
People or animals, and nature in general, are recurrent themes in my practice. I see my work as an attempt to capture a stillness in flow of the surrounding flux – a presence, a stirring, a juxtaposition of colours – and distil this into image; an attempt to grasp pieces of life and transmute them into something more permanent, communicable.
Fundamentally this is what my poetry is about too: trying to express the essence or story of certain salient moments or thoughts.
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Dawn
This piece is a monotype which is made by pressing a sheet of paper onto an image painted on a smooth surface resulting in a unique one-off print with qualities of both a painting and a print. The process of creating a monotype is somewhat loose and capricious, as one cannot completely control how the medium spreads in the pressing. This gives rise to an image that can be quite nebulous and that is to an extent a thing of chance with an openness and accidental freedom, the ethereal quality of which subtly exposes the transience and improvisational nature of actuality.
DESERT LIFE
Cracked, sun-baked mud;
alien barren landscape, unremitting,
with barely a shade or subtlety
to ease the way.
How carelessly it happened,
without noticing,
without paying attention really –
attention to all that was there.
Heed what’s left now
though little it seems:
it seemed little before
but now it’s gone.
Take pleasure in unyielding ground underfoot,
in sensations of searing air
on skin, eyes, mind.
Seep it in, absorb, become.
This is you now
and nothing else.
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Alice
This painting was part of a series of works I made by recycling old metal print plates of aluminium or copper – in this case aluminium. Painting on metal surface like this lends the image a dynamic quality since the play of light reflected from the metallic surface continues to work on it once complete, almost animating the figure.
A LIVING THING
Hopes, I now know, only serve
to diminish: skimming off
from collapsing resources
and kernelling the inside out
until it’s nowhere to be seen.
Hope itself is another beast –
loosens structure and expands
gently the lattice, seeping
animal warmth into bone,
and settles just as it is.
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Flight
This piece is also a monotype, as above, with the looseness of this method depicting something of the fleeting quality of movement in flight
AFTERMATH
Hopping mad robin
twittering indignantly, incessantly,
flying from clothesline-top
to pole-top to wall-top to shed-top,
like a maniac.
Only he’s not crazy,
except perhaps insane with grief
at the lurking thief
who took his mate
in one clean bite.
Over and over her last steps,
leaps and flights he goes
like one who is now bound
to this cursed and hallowed alike ground.
Furiously he clicks at me:
did I not see the callous crime,
this searing injustice done unto him,
his life imploded at a whim?
I shrug and reply, what could I do?
I saw the villain, but too late.
His pain, though, touches me
as he rails against the world and life’s inequities,
futilely.
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Patience
This painting in oils was inspired by an illusion in the distance that looked like three dogs patiently looking up at a window but on closer inspection turned out to be a few bushes outside the window.
HAPPINESS …
… looks like this: rain
tumbling gently, steadily
from a low sky, soaking
sodden flagstones; seeping
garden greenery in a velvet
silvery glow.
All this solid stillness
liquefied, even the gap
you left behind: presence
without form, absence
everywhere.
A point of complete
stillness upon which everything
now hangs, itself dissolving
perfectly. That’s all.
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