About the artist

Ruby Rhizome is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of the human and digital realms. Her work merges physical matter, poetry, and technology, revealing the emotional codes that connect all entities. Through both traditional and digital media, she investigates memory, symbolism, and the body as shared language.

About the artwork

"I often paint the feelings I would otherwise forget. So that when I see the painting I can feel them again. Which is probably why I never look at most of my paintings ever again.
All art is just searching for a way not to forget.
I know, the process of forgetting you can’t control. And forgetting means squeezing all that mattered once out of our life.
Like it all never was.
I think that’s worse than dying.
That’s why I paint, my love."

The Art of Forgetting is a piece where I wanted to bring together poetry, memory, and the body — specifically the brain — as a way to explore how we process emotional experiences over time. The work is made up of handwritten fragments layered over a brain scan, which for me was a very intentional contrast: something deeply personal and intimate placed on top of something clinical, factual, and impersonal.

The writing wasn’t created in a single moment. I added to it over time — not randomly, but in a way that followed the way my thoughts were returning to me. Certain phrases repeat, some contradict each other, and some feel almost like emotional residues. I didn’t edit them or try to make them flow. I wanted the structure to reflect how thoughts actually move — non-linear, looping, fragmented but still connected. In that sense, it became a kind of mental map, or maybe even a neurological pattern. I often say it’s a cognitive landscape — one that’s emotional, not diagnostic.

The work is based on my own experiences — moments of rupture, grief, forgetting, memory, childhood, love, and letting go. It doesn’t try to explain those things. It just holds them, registers them. I think a lot about how forgetting isn’t just absence. It can be a survival mechanism, a way of rewriting identity, or even an act of authorship. This piece became a way for me to mark the process of releasing something — or someone — while still making space to acknowledge that it existed.

I see this work as a kind of self-encoding. Not in the digital sense, but in the emotional and neurological one — how we inscribe certain memories into the body, and how we eventually let them fade. That tension between holding on and letting go is the center of the piece.