WALLIS Ruby

Bloodroot & Foxglove

Ireland

2026

Fuil Fréamh agus Lus Mór [Bloodroot and Foxglove] grew from a project at Lismore Castle Arts 2025, rooted in Ireland’s oldest cultivated gardens, and shaped through walks with people seeking asylum. Naming plants from home during these walks became an act of memory, healing, and reflection on displacement — especially at night — emerged as a form of resistance, uncovering traces embedded in historic colonised grounds. Made using cameraless processes, anthotypes, lumen-prints, phytograms and digital fragments, the series imagines the garden as a threshold where beauty and brutality, order and disorder coexist. Pigments drawn from beetroot and blackberry fade in sunlight, echoing bodily fragility and the quiet erasure of memory, while echoes of 18th-century Toile de Jouy design thread through the work, decolonising Eurocentric pastoral myths and their unsettled colonial shadows.