Ruth Le Gear’s practice emerges from research, collaboration, and fieldwork centred on water and the potential held within diverse water bodies from Arctic icebergs and the Baltic Sea to Irish lakes and waterfalls. Attending to the mystical, mythical, and metaphysical forces that move through water, she explores aqueous connections between human and more than human bodies, described as “becoming a body of water.”

Solo exhibitions, including Women and Water (Atelier Melusine, FR, 2021), Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (DE, 2018), Water Senses (Leitrim Sculpture Centre, 2017), Trace (CCA Gdańsk, 2015), Polar Forces (LSC/Cork Film Centre, 2013), and Water that Sleeps (Galway Arts Centre, 2009). She has also exhibited widely in group shows, including DISTINCT (Project Arts Centre, 2024), TULCA Festival of Visual Art (2021), Solas Nua, Washington DC (2018), VISUAL Carlow, and EVA International.

Her work engages with scientific and philosophical inquiry. Through moving image, sculpture, sound, and water based remedies, she investigates the sublime and our relationship to an ever changing environment, using processes such as serial dilution to create tiny poetic time machines that hold memory, place, and possibility.

Ruth makes essences from water. She has collected icebergs in the Arctic from a tall ship, wandered the desert of New Mexico, and stood on the tip of the Cape of Good Hope. In these places and wherever she is, her intention is always to try to communicate with the water that is there, this most beautiful life giving force of nature. Each body of water is unique, with its own physical and spiritual history, mineral content, and unique vibration that it imparts on living beings that it encounters. If one has ever had a drink from a crystal clear mountain stream, one from an ancient well, or a swim in the sea, they will know that all water is not the same. Her life’s work is to understand and communicate with water. She explores it in all its layers the tiny micro-organisms that live in one drop, the huge oceans and ocean creatures, lakes, rivers, clouds, mist, rain, sleet, hail, icebergs, and glaciers. She lives on the North West coast of Ireland, where it rains a lot, mostly pure North Atlantic water, swept up in the storms above Greenland and Iceland.

Ruth Le Gear has worked extensively with the Sligo Children’s Community Garden (SCCG) over the past four years. Part of her practice involves fostering intergenerational connections and community engagement, as evidenced by her projects with SCCG and Kids Own. 

Ruth has successfully worked with SCCG on a number of projects, including the Story Shed, The Seed Project with the Irish Hospice Foundation, and the Intergenerational Podcast with The Community Foundation for Ireland. These can all be seen at https://sligochildrenscommunitygarden.com/projects.