The word “shadow” has layered meanings for Ruth Dealy. The artist’s stated aim is to paint directly from her eye to her hand, ‘without the shadow of editorial opinion falling in between’. Contrary to its traditional metaphorical association with light— with something that elucidates —in Dealy’s conception, reason obscures; it makes things murky.

Her work involves an act of negation: to preempt the emergence of judgment, with its attendant baggage of doubt and insecurity, and everything that one must unlearn to see the world for what it is. Negation here is an active process, a struggle to be waged so that the fragile drive of intuition may yield something like a sense of clarity.” Throughout her life, Dealy has vied desperately with a different kind of shadow.

As a child, she lost vision in her right eye from rheumatoid arthritis. Years later, she developed glaucoma in her other eye and was forced to face in slow motion the terrifying prospect of total blindness. The works from this year-long period of impending sightlessness resonate with undiluted fear. The self-portraits, in particular, evoke the point at which fear becomes something else, something grotesque, deformed; something animal. It is not exactly anger that they display. Their marks are the flagellations of someone drowning, gasping for air, clawing her way back to the surface.

The landscapes that Dealy created in that dark place evoke a different effect. They are more lyrical, their components fading in and out of view while establishing a kind of harmony. They vibrate, as if hovering between two worlds. The unseen presence who wanders lost through those melancholy woods seems captivated by their beauty, attempting to make peace, perhaps, with the possibility that it may soon be lost to her forever.