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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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‘I would like to thank David for inviting me to be resident artist for 2025 at The High Window. It has been such a wonderful opportunity and privilege to be able to share both my art and poems here.’ [RE]
To which I would like to add my own thanks to Ruth for her inspiring contributions to The High Window this year and for the professionalism she has shown throughout. It has been a pleasure working with her. [Ed]
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Dancing Thing
This artwork was made using two different printing methods: the coloured background is a collagraph, that is a print made by gluing materials to a rigid substrate (such as wood) and making a print from it – basically making a print of a collage. Then the black figures in the foreground of the image were monoprints imprinted onto the collagraph to give the final image above.
Poem:
SHAPE
Your shape I sense
by sight
is not the one I sense
by touch:
that one feels warm and smooth,
coveted proximity
covering me over
in featherless quilt.
Your shape by sight
I cannot grasp: now here,
now there,
the seen quickly
becoming unseen.
The eye, sleight of hand
fading into distance
of faraway lands and
plans and populace
by a peaceful sea,
while I touch
wistfully,
the two connected
only tenuously.
***
Two girls
This painting is another one of the series of works I made by recycling old metal print plates of aluminium or copper, using them as a “canvas” on which to paint – copper was used in this case. Here again, portions of the copper surface were left exposed to form part of the image allowing the reflection of light to play a role in the image itself.
Poem:
THE SKATING RINK
Alabaster sun
sprinkles morning buildings,
leaving the snow-buried sleeping
undisturbed.
Smiles, chatter, clatter and chips
at the skating rink with grand-aunt Babs.
Gliding self-contained in her rounds
through the throng
while we race, try backwards,
sudden stops, fall,
check in with her at times.
Unlacing skates, dragging on boots
afterwards, we trudge homewards on slushy paths.
An adage for every occasion,
a superstition for most,
she passes on time to us:
we absorb it
like the frail sunlight
caught in the snow.
***
Yellow fox
This painting actually was directly inspired by a line in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem ‘Swineherd’: “And the yellow fox finds shelter between the navy-blue trunks”.
Poem:
Morning
Ensconced in grey,
cosy by-the-fire day.
Weak light spilt
over from the night
feigns morning backdrop
while scratchy upward branches
claw their way into the fabric.
I sit forever
and look.
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Winter solstice
This is a digital image created by distorting the photo of the painting by widening it.
Poem:
Ψ (psi), the quantum wave function of the universe
It will come as no surprise
to realise that the story
of the world is a sigh:
psi, to be precise, answers
what, when, how
but not why.
A continuum of possibilities
in that sigh; continuous wave
aping discrete (and we, pieces
playing whole). See it undulate
smoothly through craggy
outcrops, cliff faces and such;
its fate shaped exactly, reversibly, until
it snags on something, loses
composure and irrevocably chooses –
the wrong one, of course.
Then picks self up and continues
as before obliviously meandering
towards the next wrong door.
The High Window 