‘Are my works significant?’

Ilona Ruegg is a Swiss artist who has lived in Zurich since 2012. Since the 1980s, she has been developing a body of work exploring perception, space, presence and disappearance.

She is currently showing her solo exhibition Blanks and Possibles at the sentiment gallery in Zurich. Ruegg works with everyday objects, whose taken-for-granted nature she subverts through minimal shifts. What was just a mere object becomes, in her work, a problem of perception: visible yet simultaneously beyond reach, familiar yet suddenly suspect. It is precisely this that makes her work so brilliant. Anyone who is not yet familiar with Ruegg should take this exhibition as an opportunity to change that.

I was six when I fell from the apple tree, almost as quickly as the apple I’d been trying to pick. I fell off the ladder, which seemed to drift away from me in slow motion. It all happened in the blink of an eye, yet the shock lingered for years. There is no photograph that could have captured what happened in that moment. And yet more things were happening inside me at the same time than any photograph could ever have captured. Did I see all this with my own eyes? Hardly, and yet I was aware of what was happening.

My works are visible, tangible; they can be photographed. To me, what is visible and tangible seems to be only part of their presence. They conceal something that goes beyond that: an absence that is more than what the visible can capture.

Having been brought up as a Catholic, I had to attend religious education lessons. I was nine when we came to the fascinating mystery of the Trinity. We were set the task of drawing it. How on earth were we supposed to do that? The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are three and yet one. The priest knew the answer: one eye in the centre and three rays on each side. I was angry and disappointed. This man was making it far too simple. My conception of this mystery was so complicated that any drawing was bound to fail miserably.

Many years later, whilst drawing, I was struck by the memory of a game of hide-and-seek: A child who has to guard three Schiitli leaning against one another whilst everyone else is hiding. If a child manages to get back to the Schiitli unnoticed, they knock them over. I wrote on the drawing No Trinity after all these Years. What now? Today I am exhibiting the sculpture Trinity, Operated. Three three-armed mast lights with white spherical bulbs lie entwined on the floor, their arms pointing in opposite directions. They are steel blanks, replicas of lamps from the 1950s. Without being electrified, they exude their power, their darkness and their light. The Trinity remains a mystery to me, though I have come closer to understanding it.

Disappearance preoccupies me just as much as appearance. Sometimes one wishes for a cloak of invisibility. Stealth bombers use a ‘stealth technique’ to make themselves invisible to radar detection.

For Higher Ground, a radar technician let me in on the secrets, enabling me to make a small work platform disappear. It is coated with stealth material, completely enveloped by the black mass. It thus almost loses its shape and is invisible to a radar eye. At the same time, its shapeless matter makes it all the more visible. On top of it lies the same work platform, new, unused and folded. Disappearance and appearance are finally contained within one another.

If there is any meaning, it flickers in the gaps. I do not seek a definitive meaning, nor do I work on themes in order to ‘explore a field’, as they say. I work with sculptural pieces, photography and drawing to explore states. There are shifts in tension between objects or within an object, with an unfamiliar surface or an unusual placement in space – for example, too high or turned upside down. Visitors sense this tension and find themselves confronted with a field of possibilities rather than an aesthetic certainty. This can create new mental connections, as the objects are usually familiar to them, even though they may appear alien. The work becomes a tool for mobilising one’s own powers of imagination and for seeing the familiar in new constellations. In this way, meaning is perceived within one’s own contexts – not as an undecided ambiguity, but as an interpretation that can always be re-examined.

A soliloquy is an intimate dialogue without an audience, designed to bring to my attention something that would otherwise lie dormant or lurk unresolved. Whether there really is a solution is open to question. But usually something becomes clearer, so that I can move forward with a spring in my step.

During the creative process, I engage in dialogue with a work in progress that is gradually gaining autonomy, and I try to discover what the object wants and is capable of, and what I hope to achieve. There are pitfalls along the way, such as when I fall in love with the material, or when technical and financial constraints force me to abandon the project. The best moments are when everything comes together in a multitude of ways.

Questions from others? They often have more to do with the person asking than with me. Unless, of course, someone knows me very well and doesn’t make either of us the centre of attention. I like questions that cannot be answered definitively. That leads to a conversation which in turn gives rise to further questions or thoughts.