Hold Fast
Rue Kruger
2025
Medium: Archival pigment prints (photography)
Dimensions: Variable (typically 30 × 45 cm / 40 × 60 cm)
Edition: Limited edition prints (1/5)
Statement:
Hold Fast is a meditation on tenderness, injury, and the act of care. Each photograph lingers on gestures of repair — hands bandaged and open, a bird held too tightly or too gently, the faint memory of flight. These quiet tableaux trace the line between harm and healing, between what is lost and what is protected.
In this series, fragility becomes form: skin and fabric, bone and feather, shadow and light. The images are small acts of holding on — to another, to memory, to life itself.
1. “The Offering”
(Image: bandaged hand holding a single white cosmos flower)
Medium: Archival pigment print on cotton rag paper
Dimensions: 40 × 60 cm
Edition: 1/5
Description: A gesture of giving and release. A flower held in a wounded hand — an act of grace in recovery.
2. “Still, She Breathes”
(Image: hand holding a small brown bird, wrapped wrist)
Medium: Archival pigment print
Dimensions: 50 × 50 cm
Edition: 1/5
Description: The moment between life and letting go. A fragile pulse pressed against trembling skin.
3. “Feather Study I”
(Image: hand holding feather against light)
Medium: Archival pigment print
Dimensions: 30 × 45 cm
Edition: 1/5
Description: Touch translated into air. The anatomy of tenderness.
4. “Field Note”
(Image: child lying on grass holding bird to chest)
Medium: Archival pigment print
Dimensions: 50 × 75 cm
Edition: 1/5
Description: A quiet field autopsy of innocence — where wonder meets the inevitability of endings.
5. “The Cloud Keeper”
(Image: figure in blue sweater with clouds, looking out over horizon)
Medium: Archival pigment print
Dimensions: 60 × 60 cm
Edition: 1/5
Description: Memory rendered as weather. The body turns toward the sky, carrying its own forecast.
6. “Small Resurrection”
(Image: scanned sparrow on black background)
Medium: Photogram / scanography print on matte fibre paper
Dimensions: 30 × 40 cm
Edition: 1/5
Description: A study in aftermath — the stillness after flight, the quiet ache of devotion.
7. “Hold Fast”
(Image: hands cradling white flowers against black background)
Medium: Photogram / scanography print
Dimensions: 40 × 60 cm
Edition: 1/5
Description: The namesake piece. What is held is already leaving. What is left behind is light.
8. “Shadow Aviary”
(Image: projected birds over a body)
Medium: Projection photograph
Dimensions: 60 × 90 cm
Edition: 1/5
Description: A body becomes a surface for memory. Light performs the work of haunting.
9. “Flight Gesture”
(Image: projected birds and hands forming a silhouette of wings)
Medium: Projection photograph
Dimensions: 60 × 90 cm
Edition: 1/5
Description: The echo of movement — shadow, flight, and wish collapse into a single frame.
10. “Blue Haze”
(Image: blurred blue flowers, dreamy motion)
Medium: Archival pigment print
Dimensions: 50 × 75 cm
Edition: 1/5
Description: A breath caught mid-dream — a final whisper before dissolving into air.
Hold Fast II: The Afterlight
Hold Fast II: The Afterlight (2025)
Rue Kruger
Medium: Archival pigment prints on fine art paper
Dimensions: Variable (400 × 400 mm / 600 × 600 mm / 900 × 900 mm)
Edition: Limited (1/5 + 2 AP)
Year: 2025
Exhibition Text:
The Afterlight continues the quiet narrative of Hold Fast — a meditation on what remains after the breaking.
Here, the image loosens its grip. Light enters through the wound.
The body becomes landscape; the landscape, a mirror.
Where Hold Fast clung to intimacy and injury, The Afterlight leans toward release — the slow unbinding of what we once held too tightly.
Hands, water, skin, and bloom recur not as symbols of fragility, but as the language of endurance: the stillness that follows surrender.
These photographs trace the moment between memory and motion — where grief softens into air, and light remembers what it touched.
Works
1. Between
Archival pigment print on fine art paper
420 × 594 mm (A2)
Two hands suspended in gesture — connection before contact, tenderness before collapse.