Ruth Calland - "Magic Carpet" 2026
oil on paper
13 cm x 13 cm
Ruth Calland is a London-based painter, performer, curator, teacher and Jungian analyst, born in Scunthorpe in 1963. Their practice brings together painting, live art, psychoanalytic thinking, alchemy, gender expansiveness, ecology, transformation and the emergence of new forms of selfhood. Public artist records describe Calland as both an artist and teacher, and their own biography positions the work across creativity, healing, decolonisation and social change.
Calland’s current painting centres on the Pin Ups series, a body of vivid oil paintings that celebrates transgender and non-binary expression. The works often draw on stills from social media videos, selecting moments of vulnerability, power, centredness and joy. Using heightened colour, natural settings and the visual language of popular-cultural “pin-up” imagery, the series reframes gender-expansive figures as contemporary icons and explores what Calland describes as the “New Natural”: a connection with authentic selfhood beyond restrictive binaries.
Across painting, performance and curatorial projects, Calland’s work is shaped by Jungian and alchemical ideas including coniunctio, nigredo, dissociation, psychic repair and the creative collision of opposites. Earlier live works involved blind drawing and performance personae, exploring psychic connection, ancestral memory, cultural artefacts and the collective unconscious. This history continues to inform the paintings, where figures, cinematic references, landscape, fantasy, trauma and metamorphosis are brought into unstable but generative relation.
Their 2025–26 solo exhibition This Is All the Treasure We Can Have or Hold brings together painting and film around self-transformation, gender-liminal subjectivities and ecological thinking. First presented at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, the exhibition tours to Hastings Museum and Art Gallery from 4 April to 28 June 2026.