Dreaming from the Blue Land

by Ren Wooldridge

Ren is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, printmaking, performance and sculpture. Her engagement with clay, and making in general, is both intuitive and conceptual. Her practice is informed by psychoanalytic and feminist theory, but also makes space for instinctive material experimentation.

“Clay is my material language. It allows me to tell stories, express emotion, and explore lived experiences through surface, texture, and form. My sculptures are tactile narratives—embodied reflections of identity, memory, and place. 

Dreaming From the Blue Land presented two recent ceramic sculptures from my ongoing Blue series, featured in the Hidden Wardrobe exhibition. These works examined diasporic subjectivities and hybrid cultural identities, engaging with the layered experiences of migration, displacement, and belonging. While rooted in my own personal journey, the work resonated with broader themes of transition and transformation shared by many across global diasporas.

The works invited viewers to reflect on the multiplicity of homeland—how it is held, lost, and remade—and on hybrid cultural identity, shaped within the constant space of in-betweenness.

My work draws on my personal lived experience, explores feminine psychological dynamics, it grows from a personal narrative to a collective subjectivity, it is intimate but universal in its relevance.”