Ruth Maclennan

Ruth Maclennan Photo: Mariam Zulfiqar

In residence: September - October 2023

Ruth Maclennan is an artist and researcher based in London and northern Scotland. Her art practice includes films, video installations, photographs, writing, drawing and interdisciplinary and collaborative research projects.  For the past ten years Maclennan has been researching experiences of climate heating and geopolitics. Her films and photographs explore how the climate emergency has affected and altered experiences of place and landscape – both for the inhabitants, and as representation. Maclennan’s film, Treeline (2021) was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Forestry England to coincide with UN Climate Change Conference COP26. It was compiled from hundreds of video clips of forests submitted from around the world in response to an open call. It was selected by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and is touring internationally. 
A Forest Tale was filmed in the Boreal forests of Arkhangelsk during a collaborative project with Arctic Art Institute and FVU in December 2021, funded by a British Council Creative Commission for Climate. It received its premiere at the Bodø Biennale, in 2022.   

Ruth Maclennan exhibits widely internationally, in exhibitions and film festivals, and her work is held in private and public collections.  Her films have been shown at Tate, the ICA and the Royal Academy, London, Loop Barcelona, the New York Underground Film Festival and Migrating Forms, among others. She is known for her films set in post-Soviet countries, including Call of North, Hero City and Cloudberries, filmed in the Russian Arctic (London Film Festival premieres), Theodosia filmed in Crimea, Ukraine, a year before its annexation by Russia (screened at the ICA), and Capital filmed in Kazakhstan. Exhibitions include Icebreaker Dreaming (Pushkin House), Anarcadia, (FVU/John Hansard Gallery, touring), Terrapolis, (French School, Athens), The Body. The Ruin. (Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne). 

Since April 2020, Maclennan has contributed to the international collective art project, The Crown Letter, initiated by artist Natacha Nisic. The Crown Letter exhibited at the Bienal Sur in Argentina and Uruguay, in Photo Days, Paris, and the Institut Français Kyoto, in K+ (April 2022) and received the Fluxus prize. 

Maclennan has a PhD from the Royal College of Art and is Institute Associate at Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. She teaches moving image at Central Saint Martins and lectures internationally. Recent publications include, ‘Drift, capture, break, and vanish: sea ice in the Soviet Museum of the Arctic’ with Julia Lajus, in Ice Humanities: Living, thinking and working with a melting world, Ed. Klaus Dodds and Sverker Sorlin, Manchester University Press, 2022; and Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, edited by Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton, Published by Onamatapee, 2022. Her films are distributed by LUX.