This is a show of two sets of representations: Ruth’s and a portrait of loss. Without knowing how I would achieve this outcome, I began the process by handling the raw material of Ruth: the text of the narrative.
For three years, I explored Ruth’s character as an immigrant; she left her homeland, Moab, to reside in Bethlehem in a remarkable instance of devotion toward her mother-in-law, Naomi. I compared Ruth’s to my own status as an immigrant. We are both figures of transience and, accordingly, my practical work corresponded to themes of movement, “The Other,” and in a contemporary context, the tragic circumstances of immigrants and refugees arriving in the UK and entering a political treadmill organised by lamentably inadequate national leadership.
A portrait is the representation of a sitter. While the book of Ruth has a narrative structure of plotline advancement, the one constant and prevailing condition of the story is Ruth’s character. The text provides numerous instances for commentators to interpret Ruth as an unusually loyal, kind, modest and praiseworthy person. Thus in art history, Ruth is conveyed as a hard-working but diffident gleaner. See, for example, Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz) by Jean-François Millet, 1850-1853. For a portrayal of Ruth’s enduring commitment to Naomi, see Ruth and Naomi by Philip Hermogenes Calderon, 1886. There is an exciting ambiguity in Calderon’s portrayal which is discussed by J. Cheryl Exum.[1]
For my portrait of Ruth and without removing her heroism, I took an approach that removed the details of her story and the inheritance of daunting art historical precedent. From the text, I decided to detach as much content and meaning as I could and in order to do this, I simply highlighted words or sentence fragments that appealed to me, taking into account the prevalence of certain repetitions.
While decontextualising the content of the narrative by highlighting and extracting textual fragments, I felt in control of the new kind of raw material I was handling: the words of the text. Although this medium was neither paint nor clay, I was shaping it into a formal representation. In this way, I felt liberated from making through conventional materials; I had an impression that I had broken a kind of “fourth wall” in the plastic arts.
At this point, I assimilated Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism to justify my process. For Benjamin, history is not portrayed in the dominant voice of the interlocutors, but is instead found in the overlooked, threadbare, and cast-off remnants of the past. In pursuit of an explanatory articulation and greater understanding of his current situation, Benjamin fossicked through his childhood (see for example, A Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood Around 1900) as a German Jew during the rise of Fascism in 1930s Europe.
In my interpretation of Benjamin’s argument, threadbare scraps of text might carry an alternative reading. For him, a decontextualised fragment has the potential of possessing an insight that the overarching narrative has missed or dismissed. Invigorated by the manipulation of the atypical textual material, I decided to exert more pressure on the process. I envisioned making a one-word portrait through a process of highlighting words and sentence fragments from Ruth. I started with those I had already selected, and from that set, I developed a process of reducing the text to fewer and fewer words until I found a single decontextualised word that provided an alternative illumination that was missing in the commentaries.
Still, I could not predict the outcome of the exercise; I was unable to know if the process would be fruitful. I followed a step-by-step process of elimination, narrowing Ruth to a single term: guardian-redeemer (NIV). Although the process led me here, was it the final outcome or an interval?
From “guardian redeemer,” I pressed forward by scrambling and reducing the number of letters and found: renegade.
I explored the suitability of the term as a representation of Ruth. While the book of Ruth is usually scaffolded by words such as “kindness,” “devotion,” and “bucolic,” “renegade” is destabilising, and even, shocking. Analysts do not use the term “renegade” as a description of Ruth. The dictionary defines “renegade” as, “a person who has changed their feelings of support and duty from one political, religious, national, etc. group to a new one” (Cambridge Dictionary). After decontextualising the narrative from its origins, I returned to the text and meaning was restored.
While Ruth’s avowal of loyalty to Naomi is one of the most heartfelt expressions of devotion in literature (Ruth 1:16-17), it is equally an unspoken counterpart of denial. In the same breath as exclaiming unmistakable fidelity, Ruth forsakes attachment to her own family, culture, religion and nation. With respect to the first definition of “renegade,” Ruth’s decision to leave Moab characterises her as a renegade.
A second expression of “renegade” implies a kind of outside-the-law and deceptive behaviour. In line with this idea, some reviewers, for example Phyllis Trible, regard Ruth’s decision to accompany Naomi as an act of defiance.[2] After a number of farewells and Naomi’s push for her daughters-in-law (Ruth and Orpah) to stay in Moab, Ruth disobediently follows her mother-in-law (1:8-15). And since the reader is conceivably still basking in the piety of Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi and her commitment to Israelite custom, law and God, it might go unnoticed that at times during the narrative Ruth stretches the truth.
Several reviewers examine a gap between Ruth’s words and actions. In the following examples Ruth twists meaning. For instance, Boaz advises Ruth to stay close to the women and to keep her distance from the men. But at the end of the day’s gleaning, she reports to Naomi that Boaz has told her to work behind the harvesting men (2:21). Why does she say this? Is she testing Naomi’s affection?
Again, on the threshing-floor (3), Ruth exceeds Naomi’s instructions and in a courageous (foolhardy) and remarkable (imprudent) moment, proposes marriage to Boaz by calling him a “guardian-redeemer.” During the encounter, Ruth casts a sense of duty onto Boaz; she is conveying to him that she is aware of the implications of being a guardian-redeemer. Accordingly, since she cannot know how he will respond, her speech is a risky “ultimatum.” Then, in the morning when Boaz measures out the barley into her shawl, why does Ruth tell Naomi it is a gift for her mother-in-law? When Boaz counts out the portion of grain, he is bestowing the gift to Ruth; his mind is not on Naomi. Although commentators identify instances of, say, deception, by and large they define those slippages as catalysts for changing the widows’ circumstances.
In the second definition of “renegade,” there is a sense of both recklessness and deception. Although this reading invokes, say, a charge, in Ruth’s case, I am instead defining the term with meanings such as ardent and heartfelt. By being impassioned by an affection for Naomi, Ruth galvanises enough power to bring about revision in Levitical and Deuteronomic Law with regard to family and property. Therefore, I feel justified to settle on the term “renegade” as a fitting term for Ruth’s courage and needs-must attitude.
With this word-portrait in tow, I reinstated content and context in order to endorse the term “renegade” as a revelatory portrayal of Ruth.
By scrambling the text of Ruth and simplifying it to a single word, I am asserting that this process can be a tool for creating meaning. As a so-called word-portrait, the final term is an acceptable mid-point outcome and for me, indicated an efficacy of the method thus created. Applying this strategy, then, I turned my attention to providing a text for my current state of bereavement.
For allusions in Ruth, the Hebrew Bible provides a readymade narrative for the raw material of mise en abyme (the reflecting surfaces of a mirror/text within a text), but for a portrait of loss, I was without a “medium” from which to formalise an artwork. In order to create a comparable account, then, I had a few photographs and a clutch of short stories I was told by my mother. These “vignettes” are hardly stories. Nor are they tales that hold a sacred status, exploring Deuteronomic or Levitical law. Instead, they are snapshots from an ordinary life: the day the dogs escaped, the day the dog buried a bone in a horse’s manger, the day the boy fell carrying a log. But as reflecting surfaces, allusions, they are the very excerpts that anticipate the current circumstances I find myself in.
To address my present context, I interpreted Benjamin’s idea of scrutinising the past by poking around the forgotten, the mundane, the threadbare and the undervalued. To provide this material, I used fragments of my mother’s stories about when she was a cowgirl in Canada. I wrote and then reworked the vignettes, and as with Ruth, I highlighted words out of context.
Following the process I had created, I pared down the anecdotes to a single word. I ended up with the term “humorous,” although in bereavement, humour seemed a long-ago idea. But having invested in the process, I gave up some letters and scrambled what was left and discovered “hours.”
When I found the word “hours” – as with “renegade” in Ruth – I challenged its suitability by exploring its meaning and in this case, its literary fixtures. For “hours,” I had two immediate points of reference: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – originally called The Hours – and the canonical hours. Through the fixture of time, each example addresses the measurement of a day. In the Liturgy of the Hours, a set of ritualised practices mark the outset of each interval which consist of prayers, readings and hymns. The day is broken up thus: Matins or Vigil (2am), Laud (5am), Prime (6am), Terce (9am), Sext (midday), None (3pm), Vespers (6pm) and Compline (7pm). Similarly, Mrs. Dalloway’s day is divided into the tasks she performs before hosting a party, buying the flowers, etc. In the streets of London, the beat of her preparations is bracketed by the intervals of the striking clock as she organises and carries out her dutiful arrangements.
The two sets of ideas unite within the work, and it emerges under the concept “necessity.” At least from one perspective, then, the property of “necessity” exempts freewill since loss and sadness are unrequested conditions. In the analogy of “hours,” then, time irrevocably leans forward; there is nothing any one agent can do to alter its inevitability. As a liturgy of prayers, “hours” symbolised the simple daily structure onto which I was clinging. For me, “daily prayers” consisted of set features: tea at 5am, dog walk at 7. At 10am, there’s coffee, and at midday, toast; at 3, lunch and 6, dinner; at 7, telly, and at 10pm, it’s bedtime. Day in, day out. Boring, humdrum, and inconsequential for some, but for me, salvation.
Returning to my context and the purposes of carrying out a portrayal of loss, I was looking to find a way back from the inertia to which a survivor of bereavement by suicide becomes subject.
As explained, I wrote episodes of memories from my mother’s life. Through Ruth, I produced a system for seeking fruitful associations by highlighting words and sentences. By carrying out the same method, I found “hours” as a portrait of loss. For me, the term has relevant literary and religious correspondences that convey ideas about living a day through increments of time. As the purpose of the work was to uncover insights from the past to explain my present, the term “hours” was a satisfying and felicitous discovery.
I regarded the necessity of time by associating certain intervals of the day with particular duties: there are chores, there are meals, there are moments for rest, there might even be prayer or time for contemplation. Thus pain can be deeply experienced but, at the same time, incremental and not overwhelming; the kind of mundane beat that constructs the elements of a day provides comfort to the bereaved. The structured dailiness of action – hours – is a provision for living with loss. What is particularly profound about the meaning of the term is its ordinariness. While there are numbers of available distractions, and words of advice from sages and charlatans, the thing at hand – hours – is a notable presence that is always available, each of us possesses, but is utterly disregarded. As a counterpart to loss, the saturnine beat of hours is a powerful comfort.
Still, the work seemed unfinished. Even by squaring the suitability of the terms “renegade” and “hours,” I could not conceive the single words as works of art. As I had already foraged through memories for narrative fragments and reduced two sets of text to sentence fragments, I decided to enlarge “renegade” and “hours” to font fragments. Accordingly, I turned to aesthetic considerations in order to provide “the frame”: the ontological device makers use to formalise objects into exhibition-ready works.
Again, I had in mind to remove meaning from the terms and instead use the letters as graphic images. To fulfil the requirement of removing meaning, I enlarged and cropped the words. I simply wanted to display planes of colour. For colour, I chose to imitate those that I had already been using: the black of text, the yellow of the highlighting pen, and the white of the page.
Each chunk of font fragment became a pattern. To the shapes, I shuffled what would normally be black text, yellow highlight and white page. With one design, I altered the juxtaposition of the planes of colour and made two images not immediately recognisable as parts of fonts. Each single work, then, is a diptych.
As a final reckoning, I wanted to remove what was too personal or too private and model my feelings, ideas and process into display-ready objects. In this way, viewers are welcomed into and not rejected from the final portraits.
Shelley Campbell has submitted her PhD project and is finishing her corrections. Her work is multi-disciplinary encompassing art, religion, and philosophy (aesthetics).
[1] J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 129-174.
[2] Phyllis Trible, “A Human Comedy,” God and the Rhetoric of Sextuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978) 166-199, 171-173.