Review of Ruby Tingle Afterlife

Jo Manby

the Fourdrinier editor Jo Manby reviews ‘Ruby Tingle Afterlife’, a multi-media, multi-sensory show reanimating the historic taxidermy collection of The Whitaker, Rossendale as a set of newly imagined dioramas. This personal interpretation of a swamp heaven, which you can go and see until Sunday 10 March 2024, is conceptualised according to the wetland aesthetic of audiovisual artist and performer Ruby Tingle, who is represented by No Such Thing Records and PAPER Gallery Manchester. The idea of heaven on earth (as in, there is no dress rehearsal), integral to the Tingle rationale, becomes articulated in the creation of real-life vivariums in which the dead, stuffed creatures, secluded for so long in the semi-darkness of The Whitaker’s humidity-controlled stores, are given a second life. Tingle worked alongside collections curator Gina Warburton at The Whitaker, together with numerous collaborators. The exhibition, which also includes a large number of exquisite and intricate collages, together with various offerings from the collaborators who worked with Tingle to complete the show, opened on 14 December 2023 with a performance of the single Afterlife, produced by label No Such Thing Records, co-founded and run by Tingle along with Dirty Freud. For the final weekend, 9 March, the last Saturday of the show, there will be special animal guests around the museum: The Frog, The Turtle and Ruby Tingle herself.

‘To say that my body is marshland, estuary, ecosystem, that it is riven through with tributaries of companion species, nestling in my gut, extending through my fingers, pooling at my feet, is a beautiful way to reimagine my corporeality. But once we realise that we are not hermetically sealed in our diver’s suits of human skin, what do we do with this recognition? What do we owe, and how do we pay?’

- Astrida Neimanis, essay ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’ (see footnote)

Songwriter, musician, performer, music promoter, artist, performance artist, collaborator – each of these roles merge and flow with one another in the exhibition ‘Ruby Tingle Afterlife’ and its associated productions. In Tingle’s working life she lives her artworld persona, so thoroughly integrated that now it cannot be disentangled. She says that she just loves wearing ballgowns, always has done, since she was a ‘mud pie kid’, always happy puddling around in earth and water.

What’s crucial to know about Ruby Tingle as an artist, a performer and a musician is that every day is a ballgown and amphibian day. There are songs to write and sing, collages to make, pet frogs and lizards to feed, and the persona of the swamp princess is a way of life that Tingle has assumed in as natural a progression as the turning of the seasons or the flowing of a river.

Astrida Neimanis, in her essay ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’ quotes from leading feminist scholars Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément: ‘We ourselves are sea, sands, corals, seaweeds, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves… seas and mothers.’

Writing about concepts of bodies of water and wateriness of bodies, Neimanis reminds us that we are gestated in a watery world – the amniotic fluid inside the body of the mother; water is what maintains our living bodies; it permeates us and the world around us, ebbing and pooling; bathes the systems that flow transnationally across the globe – political, social, economic; we are subject to tides, taking in the world around us, ingesting it, and putting it out in some other form, later on.

It is not just women who are watery: the aqueous embodiment is a human condition, but it is a feminist concept. Neimanis discusses other water related issues as feminist questions: animal ethics, watershed pollution, evolutionary biology, death and colonisation of the environment, all of which are themes which flow through Ruby Tingle’s overlapping bodies of work.

Herpetological movement and sound seem to permeate all aspects of Tingle’s work: from the pinging beats and percussive elements of the music to the jumpy, twitchy edits in the videos. The music includes sampling from recordings of the noises that amphibians make. ‘It bleeds into your consciousness,’ Ruby says, and you get a sense of the pervasiveness of watery underworlds in the music, the lyrics, the audiovisual, even down to the prosthetic gills that she has found on Etsy.

The discussion held at Rogue Artist Studios last year, with Simon Woolham, Mike Chavez-Dawson and Richard Shields, covered the nature of the artistic persona and the way the barriers between art and life can be blurred. While she says she is not always performing, and inhabits the persona on various levels depending on the situation, living as the artwork she has created gives her a lot of pleasure. It’s so lovely to hear about a woman artist taking such sensory delight in the world and living it in a kind of flow state.

‘Personal mythologising takes place a lot in my imagination, whether for fun or as a wider part of my art and music… early inspirations have stuck but also evolved - literature, horror, comic books and their lore are all things I escape to.’ However, there is also a lightness to the swamp princess persona: ‘I think it would be problematic to live in a 'character' permanently, so I don't really see it like that, the persona is more something that although it is a deep-rooted part of my identity, in reality and in my imagination, I try to keep it playful.’

I ask if there are any particular makeup brands she uses on her face. ‘No, I'm really cheap when it comes to things like that, I don't use much, mainly just £2 lipsticks. I used to use more make up and things like face paint for performances and images but now I just keep it simple, and am developing more of a relationship with prosthetics.’ Tingle talks about her delight in finding the prosthetic gills, using eyelash glue to fix them in place, the way they match her platinum metallic bodice perfectly. ‘There are more elaborate versions that I’ll go onto use,’ she says.

I ask about the type of makeup she uses to colour her fingers in the videos – green fingers, charcoal grey fingers: ‘I accidentally dye my fingers when I use dyes on fabric and paper for the collages,’ she laughs: ‘Brusho dye – that crystal colour stuff, comes as a powder you add to water and it dyes everything in sight.’ It’s similar to magic stains in fantasy fiction too, she says, when someone ends up with colourful fingers after casting spells.

When the exhibition opened in December, with Tingle performing the new single Afterlife, The Whitaker was sonorous with a waterfall of music emanating from The Old Stables event space. Audio visual feasting was on offer with long range guitars and synthesized droplets of beats and rhythms overlaid by Tingle’s melodious vocals that flow and swirl like ribbons of weed sprinkled by waterlilies. Above the stage, video of swamplands and footage of Tingle accompanied by the mysterious Swamp Reaper, dressed in a black leather coat and a bird skull mask.

The question arises of a female performance artist living an artistic life of sensory pleasure, on her own terms, the way she likes it. While some female artists have tended to deliver performances riven with pain and testimony to real suffering – not to belittle or decry such performance art, it is powerful and essential – but this is something else, more allied to cosplay, hedonism and anthropomorphism. I asked Tingle if she is influenced by Pre-Raphaelite costumes and also the way the Arts and Crafts Movement bled into the idealising, heroine-worshipping paintings and vice versa, in terms of ceramics, textiles, furniture, jewellery.

‘They were probably some of the first of many romantic images that would inspire me from an early age as my Mum always had posters around the house of these artists. There are a few things like this from my early years that have culminated in my practice and image – Disney, old musicals. The William Morris quote always stuck with me about having things either useful or beautiful, I definitely live by that in my practice but also my home and studio which of course extends into my work – the collecting, sorting, discarding, reusing, manipulating etc.’ 

For the Whitaker show, the inciting inspiration was the display piece, the Tiger and the Python. Taxidermy was originally used to create dramatic situations which were not scientifically grounded but fabrications. Early taxidermy was in response to the number of explorers of the era travelling to far flung places and sending back dead animals. Artists then made studies of them, and they were stuffed, not necessarily correctly, almost creating fictional versions of real animals, with only a pelt, a skin or a plumage to go on.

The Whitaker seeks to rejuvenate the off-show collection and Ruby has activated these historic pieces with additions of pastel coloured frogs and lizards, plastic flowers and waterweeds, and Angela Tait’s collaborative interpretation of historic ‘frog mugs’ – a 17th century drinking joke – a way of creating cups like lilypads or corals to act as containers to hold small amphibians and insects. This recalls Tingle’s previous work with Palissy-ware in her exhibition ‘Lagoons’ at Warrington Museum and Art Gallery in 2023. Bernard Palissy (c1510-90) created complexly decorated ceramics using casts taken from live lizards and other biological specimens.

Related to this is the animated layering contributed to the exhibition by the anthropomorphic characters, or mascots of the wetlands – a different way of interpreting the museum collection. Tingle’s characterful collaborators include artist Simon Woolham as The Frog, who has been out and about round Greater Manchester for some years now, and has been joined by Lucy Haighton, The Turtle/ The Otter, and now musician and performer KINRAR as The Swamp Reaper, a new dark element in the wetlands aesthetic world, a development of the plague doctor persona from his own practice.

Steven Calver, the olfactory artist, sat down with Ruby to plan the fragrance installation for the exhibition, with lots of chemicals and scent strips for testing. Tingle wanted something ‘green and bright and heavenly, but with an undercurrent of decay and rotting leaves’. It’s an important element as, along with the music and the visual arts aspects, it completes the sensory experience, plunging the visitor, the audience, even deeper into the wetlands aesthetic in a new immersive reality.

The wetlands footage is generally spliced from two places – one a local site near to where Ruby lives, and the other the Martin Mere Wetland site, part of WWT Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust – but lots of video moments are used, akin to the one second a day posts on Instagram – so there is a large repository of footage to draw on, similar to the collage material that is constantly being amassed.

So – the working week. What does it look like? ‘I work in phases,’ she says. ‘I look at what needs time and block it out week by week, month by month. Music takes the longest. Studio work – the wall-work – gets done early, then there’s plenty of time for framing decisions.’ I ask about the recording studio aspect. Tingle and Dirty Freud co-founded it. Danny (Dirty Freud) does the management and A&R; Tingle takes on the visual arts coordination, sets up collaborations (such as their ongoing arrangement with Warrington Museum and Art Gallery to present live music/performance in the museum setting) and handles the social media.

Tropical Heart is a single, newly released on 28 February. Releasing a single, or EP, is usually tied in with exhibiting but in 2024 there will be more standalone music from Tingle. Tropical Heart is all about ‘the romance of big river ferries, all lit up, flamingoes, love and desire entwined with the environment.’ Thinking of the potential narratives of love, loss, death and so on, I asked Tingle if she thought about taking such narratives into the realm of filmmaking. Someone else had asked her about this, she said; at the moment, it’s a matter of low-budget music videos, and although she doesn’t rule it out, there’s something to be said for ephemeral, fleeting things. Interestingly, it’s EPs rather than albums or singles that Tingle prefers: project based, ‘a central theme with arms’, she puts it, ‘something with the length and room to explore in an EP.’ There is undoubtedly a fashion for singles but then they are a bit short for exploring a narrative.

Talking of social media, of public presence, I ask Tingle about the way she could be seen as a living advert for her own brand. We end up talking about tableaux vivants. French for living picture, this was a fashion belonging to the historic 1830-1920 period (briefly revived during the Pandemic), when certain cultured socialites held fashionable tableau gatherings where they would dress up and arrange themselves in a fixed dramatic scene from classical mythology, art, literature, history or everyday life, and hold the pose silently and without movement.

The critic, essayist and novelist Walter Pater (1839-94) with his doctrine of art for art’s sake, explored the idea of the aesthetic moment, and the aesthetic life, as a means of the individual recovering something entirely beautiful out of the space-time flow of Darwinist existence. He questioned whether humans were unique among the species of the earth, and if so, could this beautiful life, where an individual (in other words, an individualist) was, however briefly, condensed into a perfect moment (like a painting, a photograph, or a tableau) be the thing that set them apart. Academics argue over whether Pater ever did reconcile whether this was possible to do without being immoral. A problem that troubled him throughout his writings was whether a life lived purely for the beautiful could be reconciled with an ethical life.

A downside to Tingle’s watery paradise might be the elements of plastic in the show. Artificial flowers, weeds and creatures. However, there is also recycling and upcycling going on – vintage crocodile bags – like ivory, they should never have been made, but they exist now – materials such as this can be given a second life, like the taxidermy collection or the frog mug ceramics. Plastic is integral to life now – the Anthropocene will be known in future for its layering of plastic, polythene and cellophane as the pre-Cambrian is known for sea fan and trilobite fossils. Tingle’s aesthetic is not about living in some fictional past, it is very much in the present, looking forward.

Tingle’s life could also be said to be aesthetically beautiful but ethical – she is a champion of conservationism and in her work aims to contribute to it through her particular brand of cryptozoological storytelling. The opening event at the Whitaker also saw the launch of a new conservation beer created between Duration Brewing & Drink Beer Save Turtles to raise funds and awareness for the charity Turtle Survival Alliance, for example.

The fourth wall – the divider between performer and audience – and also whatever the wall is between the performer and the human being behind the performance – are watery, permeable and unfixed: the artist/performer lives and breathes their work, on or off stage, as an amphibian breathes either in or out of water, depending purely on where they find themselves at any given time. There’s no on/off switch, just a shimmering mutability.

Footnote:

‘Hydrofeminism: or on Becoming a Body of Water’ by Astrida Neimanis was published in ‘Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice’, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.