This Glass is Full of Looking
- A Critical Response by Mark Leahy

The vitrine is filled with overlayed experiences of time and the temporal, sensations of duration, or the momentary, of the historical, of life lived and events occurring. The glass case carries the times of archive and retail, the holding of things in perpetuity for a future to tell a story, and the offering of things for sale for now in a commodity culture that depends on transience and turnover. While the museum works to stop the effects of time through conservation and preservation, the shop relies on a sense of consumer pressure to get it now, to catch it before it goes stale. Paul Ramsay's process of saline encrustation, of coating disparate objects with pigment and crystals, further complicates this mixed temporality. Salination can function as a preservative, and yet the salt crust is vulnerable to shifts in atmospheric moisture. Drying time is necessary for the formation of the skin or crust, such as on 'Three Green Objects' (2023) or 'Landscape Piece (Camo Can)' (2023) where the mottled and textured surface has been created through wetting and drying, painting and waiting. On other pieces such as 'Strawberry Thief Box (variation IV)' (2024) the build-up of paint fragments suggests a slow laborious craft method. A drink can or a fast-food tray suggest both the ephemeral, the throwaway, as well as the durability of consumer plastics that can survive for centuries in landfill sites (to become future museum relics). By presenting these installed, stilled, objects with a soundtrack, Ramsay adds another time layer. 'Songs of Garden Guitars, played from small speakers hidden in two pigment encrusted disposable drink cups, introduces the now of listening, the passing present of the musical score to the display of objects, so the event becomes an experience of time folds and times folded.

Gathering the objects in the glass case associates with the display of items in a second-hand shop, as well as the presentation of souvenirs or heirlooms in someone's home. In their various materials, different provenances, multiple materials, the things collected here belong together only because they have been brought here by the artist. Ranging from eggshells in egg cups 'Three Green Containers with Fragments' (2021), to a 'sand' encrusted red plastic beach spade 'Play (Red/Gold)' (2024), in their variety, the works resist classification or categorisation. In part it is through the process of coating or covering them that they feel related. Family resemblance relies on the pigmented coating that Ramsay has applied, their generic relationship is established by the process they have undergone rather than some existing category or type. Like a cabinet of curiosities, they have been assembled by an individual consciousness, and then shared for observation by other minds, other viewers.

Another encrustation these objects have undergone, another overlaying or attachment is conveyed by the individual titles. Each piece within the cabinet is named, and this naming operates across different levels, with word play, association, scale and humour all at work. 'Deor II (The Fulford Walls)' (2024) plays with the object form as a miniature deer, as well as referring to the Anglo-Saxon poem 'Deor' found in the Exeter Book, and to the colour of the walls of the room in which the vitrine is installed. Other titles play on the sound of the words, with 'PaintTin I' (2018) being both a painting and a paint tin. Brand and commercial naming is alluded to in other cases where the object's origin in a retail exchange or in a promise of beauty or success is recalled. Some of the titles work as sight gags, where a resemblance or likeness is conjured, as in 'Stem' (2024) where the paint brush echoes a flower in a vase, and the concept of refraction operates as an analogy to the working of verbal-visual displacement. The sense of the pigmented objects as miniature landscapes brings scale to the fore, with the viewer made giant as she peers at tiny fields or trees or hills. This is directly alluded to in the title of 'Landscape piece', and more subtly evoked in 'Jeru' (2023) where the partly crushed green-encrusted tray links to “this green and pleasant land” as sung in William Blake's 'Jerusalem'. Encountering these disparate things, the viewer gets a glimpse into the perception of the artist, seeing for a moment what or how Ramsay sees. Operating between language, painting, installation and music, This Glass is Full of Looking presents a concentrated or distilled accumulation that invites a visitor to take time in reading and deciphering.

Mark Leahy