Loraine Rutt

Loraine Rutt is a British artist who lives and works in London. Working predominantly in ceramics, she also draws and constructs three-dimensional paper reliefs and structures, and previously worked as a cartographer at Birkbeck College. In 2024 she was elected as a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society.

Maps have an implied honesty, yet the transformation from Earth’s sphere to flat plane requires something to yield - to be stretched, shrunk, or erased. This alters the perception of place and our sense of belonging and identity. Loraine’s work plays on this riff of altered representation of factual mapping. She enjoys the lyricism of transforming two-dimensional maps of three-dimensional places, back into three-dimensional objects. Playing with scale and volume, whether it’s a pocket globe putting the world in your hand, or topography with amplified relief, Loraine aims to draw focus to a particular theme, be it environmental or social inequality, or a monumental voyage.

Maps can excite, engage, inspire, motivate and document history. Loraine’s practice is honed by three decades of fine clay yielding to fingertips, using improvised tools to create surfaces with map-like clarity. By transcribing source material gathered via the Internet into clay, the shifting digital landscape is transformed into permanent analogue artefact.

 “The thing that unites all my work is human interaction with landscape.”