Ruby Hoppen born in 1989, is a Naarm based artist, working mostly with textiles and paint. She is a single mother of two and a founding member of the World’s Worst Wagga quilting guild. Her aim is to work towards an exploration of symbolism through the production of textile based works. Her quilts seek to scrutinise the cultural and socio-political inconsistencies within officially documented textile history. In searching for symbolic representation when making a quilt, she seeks guidance from oral literature and superstition. The work is a result of following stories and systems handed down for thousands of years, this imbues a deeper meaning and a more figurative reading of the work than if it were purely abstract.  The quilts speak as an idea of a traditional method and material nature that has been metamorphosed into something new, a visual language that can link people to their
 past, present and futures.

What happens when subjectivity is co-constituted by things we cannot fully see or control?

Now housed within a former maternal and infant health centre, Seventh Gallery is a site already charged with a history of care and surveillance - an architecture that casts long shadows across The Other Room. The exhibition emerges from, and responds to, this ambient haunting. Here, psychic and physical space fold into one another like feedback. We find ourselves in rooms within rooms, interiors flickering with spectres of weirdness, intimacy, and disturbance.

Across sculpture, installation, photography, ceramics, painting, and animation, the artists in The Other Room work with and against their materials to render subjectivity as slippery, unstable, and relational. This is a show about the immaterial textures of interior life - the feelings we inherit, the structures we inhabit, and the haunted architectures we build to contain them.

Image | I like to take care of Myself, Fergus Berney-Gibson & Zoë Prineas, 2024, Dumbbells, Leather, Fur, Steel, Velvet. Detail view.