Ruth Waller: SOMEONE ONCE

Ruth Waller
Someone Once (in Gaza and Ukraine), 2024
16 panels, acrylic on paper (unframed)
171 x 120 cm
$5000

Showing in the Civic Art Bureau WIndow 16-30 April 2025.

Someone Once (in Gaza and Ukraine) was exhibited at Rogue Pop-up Gallery, Sydney, September 2024.

Ruth Waller’s series “Someone Once…” was made as an attempt to respond to the relentless daily reports of horrific violence inflicted on the people of Gaza and of Ukraine.

Waller states, “It seemed hard to justify making paintings in the face of such atrocities on our screens every night. I thought of ancient classical funerary urns which traditionally carried narrative imagery, and finding myself with neither the words nor the imagery to respond to present events, I chose to render these vessels mute, and hence “intentionally left blank”.  This term came to me from poet Ann Lauterbach, quoted recently in the New York Review of Books in discussing her poem “War Zone” which concludes with this phrase. She says:

The poem addresses an inconsolable muteness we might feel when we are confronted with images of the ravages of war and of those who experience it in real-time. It tries to imagine the absolute state of pain and grief, which cannot be shared with others except through metaphors or analogies. For me, these metaphors are about silence and absence.”

Ann Lauterbach
War Zone

for Paul Auster

Days emptied out along the hairline
cracks where you spilled the glossy oil
where you stopped resemblance from looking,
where your thoughts, if they were thoughts,
ghost things of the mind, dream things of the night,
fell down and down to the last rock under the pile,
the final colorless span, making no sound or only
the sound that cannot be heard, without
mimic, so that it spread as if made of inky moss,
as if made from a tincture of fallen petals, of thin bloods
and thin wings of the tiniest insects, bodiless in flight,
translucent as dusk but, even so, changeless,
like the grieving of a stranger in a photograph of war.
Last line intentionally left blank.