Artists may see the world differently from most people, but for artist Ginny Ruffner, especially after her brain injury, thinking about thinking, thinking about wonder and how the mind creates and is endlessly fascinating.
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How my work has developed over the years that it keeps me interested
is through my curiosity.
My curiosity has been--in the past 15 years anyway--really about science.
I have been really fascinated with the recent developments in genetics,
and my current series I've been working on the most, the Aesthetic Engineering Series,
is about how genetics might be just "what if."
And thinking about thinking, thinking about wonder has kept me really interested.
Perhaps language might be the only common denominator in my work over the years.
And by language I mean language in the very esoteric sense,
not language like we're speaking, but there are many kinds of languages:
unspoken, symbolic, religious, iconographic; color is a language.
And wow, what languages mean and what they do, they are communication,
which having the accident made me really think about how I could communicate
because when I first woke up, all I could do was this.
When I could move my hand, they had me pointing to an alphabet board.
That was the way I could communicate.
I wanted to get from here to here or from here to here, and I couldn't do it,
so I had to think of a different way.
Produced by Victoria Tilney McDonough, Ashley Gilleland, and Jared Schaubert, BrainLine.
Ginny Ruffner is an internationally acclaimed artist who lives in Seattle, Washington. In 2012, Ruffner was featured in a feature-length documentary called Ginny Ruffner: a not so still life, which focused on her refusal to let a debilitating brain injury slow down her drive to create art, the film challenges viewers to see the world from a new and unexpected perspective.
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