A collaborative project and exhibition between Ruby Tingle & Pannett Art Gallery, exploring Tingle's personal links with the Soper sisters as an artist and amateur naturalist, who spends most of her time reclusively in her local wetlands and home studio, caring for wildlife and her pet amphibians and reptiles. She has conducted a year-long research project in the Pannett's archives and at sites including RSPB Bempton Cliffs, YWT Fen Bog, May Beck and Welwyn Hertfordshire- the Sopers' hometown- to find links between the collection and natural environments that surround it today.
Afterlife resurrects the Whitaker’s off show taxidermy collection as new dioramas in a temporary ‘swamp heaven’. Inspired initially by the Whitaker’s famous tableaux The Tiger & The Python, these new interventions echo the historic use of taxidermy where unnatural depictions of nature were favoured over scientific accuracy; the diorama has been adopted as a myth making tool. Environmental conversation undersets this new work- the fabrication of a dream afterworld, based on real living spaces for these dead specimens promotes Tingle’s belief that the idea of ‘heaven’ is already here on earth, in nature, and must be preserved.
Lagoons draws together the Museum’s herpetology collection and Cabinet of Curiosities Gallery through collage, music, film, installation and performance to explore the preservation of amphibians and reptiles. Inspired by these species links to the monstrous and mythological, Ruby has drawn upon the museum’s Spirit Store, Prehistory gallery, Palissy-ware objects and painting ‘Daughter of the Lagoons’ to create interventions which look at these animals’ extraordinary nature in folklore and reality. Performances invite visitors to step into a fantastical underworld of anthropomorphic characters, who will be present in the galleries just as reptile creatures would have lounged around the vast red desert and salt lakes of pre historic Warrington.
A living self portrait and sculptural interventions, with original score installed in the Reading Room of Chetham's Library; responsive ideas were drawn together along with fictional concepts set in the city, reflecting the Library’s collection of local folktales. Ermine was created as a new urban myth set in the surrounding medieval quarter: a make-believe future Manchester has suffered an oil spill into the Irwell, forcing its water fowl to adapt and set up home in metropolitan habitats. Focusing on the unnatural presence of white in nature,
