Judith Waring stages encounters between object and subject, in an act of defiance directed towards both entities. The polemic is that of alienation and the acute rawness of seeing idealism defeated.

Her practice engages with a quietly tense consideration of materiality and scale, along with a tempered exchange between the organic and inorganic. These encounters are disruptive - the tease is an oblique glimpse at that which usually lurks in peripheral vision. Like silence, the peripheral occupies a fecundity of ignored space. Yet once encountered, the overlooked is contested. The distillation of process and material is driven by the real and imagined temporal and spatial possibilities of the ‘sculptural’ and the seductive lure of the impossibility of daring to defy gravity.

Open-water swimming is the agent of this practice. Water with its tidal fluctuations and strong undercurrents dictate the where and the when. The movement of the body in a medium which simulates an escape from being earthbound offers a lens, a refraction of things, a fluid gaze. It is, of course, entirely delusional and has the same pull. Judith’s aquatic dérives include swimming the Hellespont (Dardanelles), from Europe to Asia, and crossing the confluence of the Thames and Bow Creek at Trinity Buoy Wharf. These actions are contingencies, the transience of histories and their narratives colluding with that moment of right here, right now.

http://www.chelseaspace.org/archive/jazzonia-pr.html

http://www.theliferoom.org/site/projectsartworkswritings

Judith Waring (b. Belfast) studied Classics at the University of Cambridge and Fine Art at Central Saint Martins London.