Ruth Cornelisse is a visual artist who graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (ENSBA Lyon). She develops a practice centred on the image, working across photography, painting and installation.
Desire and wonder are the underlying forces of her practice. The notion of the threshold is central to her work: the threshold between the visible and the invisible, appearance and disappearance, the tangible and the imaginary. She explores areas of ambiguity and in-between spaces, where imagination takes over from perception.
She creates deliberately fragmentary images, in which what is missing opens up a space for projection. The off-frame, blur, superimposition, erasure and the use of flash all contribute to a visual language that questions the limits of vision. The image emerges as a space of tension, revealing as much as it conceals.
In her work, a sense of porosity emerges between art history and everyday life, between collective memory and intimate experience, but also between human beings and their environment. Symbolic and mythological references create a circulation between different imaginaries. She thus weaves networks of images and poetic associations, often unfolding as installations conceived as paths to be completed.
Time plays an essential role in her process: some images are created in isolation and later extended, sometimes several years afterwards, into series or larger bodies of work. These juxtapositions allow images separated by time to enter into dialogue and gradually form cohesive ensembles. While photography lies at the heart of her practice, painting is increasingly taking on a central role in her work. Light, in particular, becomes a space of resonance between inner experience and the environment.
Her practice is shaped by the question of incompleteness, in a search for correspondences and unity.