Biography

Ruby Andromeda Miller is based in Michigan’s upper peninsula, right along the coast of the majestic Lake Superior. Originally from Mid-Michigan, she grew up in the Lansing area and earned her BFA in Sculpture at Grand Valley State University and an Associates in Welding Technology at Grand Rapids Community College. She has shown work and taught in both Michigan and New York.

 

 

Artist’s Statement

Most of Ruby’s work plays with notions of memory and the ‘ghosts’ fostered in the everyday objects that surround us. She works with a variety of methods and materials- carefully drawn walnuts, thread-webbed scraps of metal, manipulated, beaded, cast metals, welded steel, collaged and painted bits of fabric joined with ambiguous found objects. One of her most common working methods is to apply textile techniques to alternative materials- for example; metals, found objects and trash materials.

These materials and methods point to edges, physical and metaphorical. Influenced by her rural upbringing where the borders between the natural and artificial world were fuzzier- assemblages often incorporate materials that have lived out their intended life and end up suspended in states of relative decay. Sometimes there is an element of sweetness and sentimentality, but always with a shade of the feral. Other pieces speak more directly to the ways in which living along an edge leaves one vulnerable to unpredictable forces and makes the point that nature often lacks a sense of justice. It explores the detritus of human habitation and the natural world in a way that invites her audience to see themselves as fellow animals, ultimately using the same resources/spaces and leaving things behind.

These transformations invite engagement with a greater degree of curiosity and creativity. It is through sharing her careful observations and surprising combinations that she hopes to inspire her audience to look at the world around them with a heightened sense of the vibrant, magical and mysterious.