Kate Ruck is based in Helsinki, Finland, with ongoing ties to New York and Las Vegas, New Mexico, where she spent over a decade fabricating and managing production for large-scale sculptural and land-based works before turning to her own practice.
Working across sculpture, installation, textiles, and text—often in collaboration—Ruck’s projects begin from the possibilities of what sits beside a narrative: the companion plant that grows in relation rather than in rows, the five days that fall outside the Mayan calendar, the footnotes in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands running untranslated between English, Spanish, and Nahuatl, or a landscape persisting as memory, projection, and desire long after the place has been left. She follows what moves through these things and what happens when they meet. There is humor and plurality in that space, in how a thing can hold many different relationships to a concept at once and stay alive through all of them.
Ruck holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki (FI) and a BFA in Video Game Art & Design from the Illinois Institute of Art, Chicago (USA). She was part of the inaugural cohort of the Centre for Nordic Otherwise in Aarhus (DK), and has been an artist-in-residence at MORPHO Antwerp (BE), Nesse (NL), and Factum Arte in Madrid (ES). Her work has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Kone Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and Culture Moves Europe.