Here is a woman's head inside a dragon's mouth, the sharp points of its teeth hovering above the skin of her neck. She appears to be in mortal danger, yet her expression is not one of fear, but of trust and calm. Her arms are wrapped around the dragon's neck in an embrace. This woman and the dragon are the protagonists of Ruth Speer's folktale The Village which unfolds across a series of paintings and objects in her solo exhibition of the same name at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery. In a traditional fairy tale, the woman would be a princess, the dragon a villain and the hero a (male) knight. But there is no knight in Speer's story, and the dragon is not so much a fearsome creature as one with transformative potential, appearing across the works in different forms: as a man, tree and even merging with the woman herself. This is a story about love and the ways in which it challenges and changes us.
imagined the works to be part of a historical collection found in a mythical village: artefacts relating to a local folklore, alongside fragments of everyday life, now brought together for display, their original purposes and the stories behind them not entirely known.