Look for Ingrid Ruthig exhibit in May

[My March 2010 column in the Ajax/Pickering News Advertiser]

“We are constantly bombarded by language,” says Ajax writer and visual artist, Ingrid Ruthig. “From TV, radio, books, the print media, the internet and even the person next to you on their cell phone, a barrage of words comes at us that we have difficulty processing.” In 2007, Ruthig set out to reflect this phenomenon in a series of collages she called Fragments of the Missing. And landed a showing of the works at the Clarington Public Library in Bowmanville in 2008. This enigmatic and visually arresting set of square panels was created by “deconstructions and reassemblies” starting with computer text printouts of her original poems plus pieces of handmade papers from the Japan and Korea that she glued in layers on wood panels. She is booked to show these works and others in an exhibition at the Ontario Power Generation Information Centre from May 3 to June 21. And will show newer works at Clarington Public Library’s Artspace on the Mezzanine during the month of October.

Art and literary sensibilities have woven their way through the fabric of Ruthig’s life. She recalls: storytelling from the cultured German background of the maternal side of her family; the strong ambitions of her parents for her to be a musician as she grew up in St. Marys, Ontario; the art training she received from an actress/artist in Stratford; and an impressive career, since the late 1990s, as an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction and a literary reviewer and critic.

Initially, however, her career aspirations took her in a more pragmatic direction as she studied architecture and graduated with a degree from the University of Toronto in 1986 and spent a dozen years working in the field. But a downturn in the business, coupled with responsibilities as mother of two young daughters conspired to make her a stay-at-home mom in the Ajax house she shares with husband, Peter. However, simply sitting down to type on her pc reminded her of poetry and screen plays she’d dabbled in at earlier stages in life and she threw herself “fullbore” into writing: attending workshops, submitting to literary magazines, and assuming a role with a local arts and letters journal.

For information about Ruthig’s upcoming writing and visual arts projects, go to www.ingridruthig.wordpress.com