The Leper Chapel’s annual exhibition for Homelessness & Leprosy Sunday 2005 also honoured Holocaust Day - an installation by Ruth Hartley of her large scale painting series entitled ‘/raItz/n’ (rights/rites) together with an altar piece made especially for this event. Ruth chose the phonetic spelling as her title because she did not want to prioritise ‘rites’ over ‘rights’ or vice versa. Both meanings are central to the installation.
The ‘/raItz/n’ (rights/rites) series is first of all a personal artistic response to the 9/11 attacks. The individual paintings are entitled ‘Oppression, Resistance, Education, Action, and Liberation. They are memorials to human courage and human despair and question the usage of tragic events by people for power and political ends.
Ruth says
“making art is stepping out into space and hoping to fly not fall.
For many years my work has included falling figures . . .
. . . these paintings are about human flight and about human endeavour. They are not about buildings or trades or nation states. They are about hope and courage even in the midst of disaster.”
Ruth Hartley lives at present in Cambridge, teaching art and making her own work. Born and educated in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and living for many years in Zambia where she worked in support of Zambian artists, Ruth has always been interested and involved in the politics of Liberation. As a feminist she looks always for the personal in the political. She believes in the importance of the creative act and in freedom of expression as the most certain guarantee of human dignity and rights.
For sometime Ruth has been passionately concerned about the HIV/ AIDS Pandemic in Africa She is currently working on a series of memorial drawings honouring friends and artists who have died from this disease.

for more info contact : Ruth Hartley