ARTIST FEATURE: Ruby Smedley

Ruby Smedley is a Boorloo/ Perth based artist with a creative background spanning theatre, film, painting, sculpture and drawing. Through her multidisciplinary practice she creates artworks that are often performative and kinetic in nature.

Bringing elements of our inner selves, such as our emotions and thought processes into the outside world, Ruby’s work creates a foundation for exploring how we perceive and interact with others. Many of her latest artwork’s centre on the impact of chronic illness on these ideas, influenced by her own diagnosis of endometriosis.

A finalist in the 2024 Lester Prize, Ruby has exhibited across Western Australia, New South Wales, Taipei and New York, was artist in residence at REmida, Perth in 2022 and has worked as a scenic artist across film and television.

Hear from Ruby where her interest in art came from, how her own health experiences influence her work and what some of the best responses she’s received to her work are.

Tell us a little about yourself and what got you interested in art? 

I’m a Boorloo (Western Australia) based multi-disciplinary, chronically ill artist, predominately working in painting and making work about the body.

There wasn’t really a specific moment where I became interested in art, it’s just how it has always been, something I’ve always done.

All kids are creative and expressive, but I definitely spent a lot more time than most drawing, it was all I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time free-hand duplicating images out of books and was obsessed with creating a secret language – getting enjoyment out of trying to make whatever was in my head. It hasn’t really changed much since then, I still spend most of my time painting, drawing and creating, with whatever form it takes on.

Much of your work features and explores women’s bodies – what led to this focus and how is it informed by your own experiences?

I am a cis female and identify as that, so inevitably my work will have that lens whether that is a deliberate choice for a work or sub-conscious. This perspective also emerges, as the context of my practice is coming from personal themes and experiences. But I don’t see it as a focus, in some ways I see it as adjacent, or a fine-line I’m treading. I’m not necessarily exploring the female form in my work, more so it is about what bodies can represent and how we employ them as a tool of communication.

The complexities regarding endometriosis have definitely impacted my practice and its trajectory, just like it has left an imprint on every other part of my life.

Endometriosis doesn’t care about gender, class, race or other disabilities. It has been found in men (AMAB) and on every major organ in the body, it is a whole body disease but it’s considered a gynaecological condition and medical care is usually provided by gynaecologists. It often feels like watching progress move in a circle, when every facet of this illness seems to have some form of contradiction.

These frustrations and incongruences rubbing against each other have entered my work over time, leaning into the broader questions about better ways of treating people and considering gender. My work often reflects on the impacts of pigeonholing people, the effects of regarding gender as something concrete or something fluid. Leaning into how rigid and stale ideas that are affixed to certain bodies have real impacts on almost everything we interact with on a daily basis, from quality of life to medical systems, socially and professionally.

You have a background in theatre, film, painting and sculpture, what do you love about these mediums and how do they inform your practice? 

I like that each way of making encourages you to engage your body, its tactile nature and physicality of each practice. Making work about the body while moving my own and involving it in the process comes naturally and makes sense.

Working in theatre and film has influenced the size of my work, I feel more comfortable in a larger scale. Working over multiple disciplines has made me less tied to a particular medium and focus more on servicing the idea, what medium will best achieve or represent what I have visualised in my head.

Your work often uses the ‘physical,’ representations of the corporeal body or tangible sculptures, to investigate elements of ourselves that otherwise remain invisible, such as our identities and emotions. What interests you about making the unseen visible and why is art a great way to do this?

Not everything is tangible and it’s a challenge to try and make these things so, there are no rules except trying to turn fabric or paint into a particular emotion or thought.

It’s also a way to sort through the swirling mess in my brain. It’s helped me to work through being diagnosed with an ‘invisible’ illness, the changes I’ve had to make in my life and confronting the reality of its permanence. It has given me an avenue to have more clarity and a better understanding of what I’m experiencing, by giving a specific symptom or experience a physical shape it can feel more manageable.

Bringing personal aspects of our own lives, such as our experiences of chronic illness, into our creative work can be both daunting and cathartic. How does sharing your own experiences with viewers make you feel? 

When you know you’ll be living with illness your whole life you need to be able to talk about it in different ways, find the humour within it and as you say, some kind of cathartic, freeing or exorcising process to help.

Making can be a very solitary process, when I’m working on something I’m not thinking about much else, just about the process and getting the physical to line up with the idea. It’s only when it is in a shared space that I remember there are outside reactions to them, which can bring unexpected surprises and responses.

What is one of the best responses to your work you’ve received?

Recently someone told me that one of my paintings was the closest interpretation to expressing how they often feel. I received a message a few weeks later to say they had been diagnosed with the same condition as me. This made me feel like I am on the right track in being able to articulate something invisible, something that is felt and that can’t always be expressed with words.

But I would say my favourite responses are from the subjects themselves. One model was asked how they felt seeing themselves in a work and she responded ‘strong’. When I asked another model for her consent to apply for a prize with a work of her, she responded with ‘I already tell everyone I’m an award-winning piece of art’.

There’s a lot of trust between an artist and the subject. To have support for what you are planning to make and to know that the end result was received in the way you’d like it to be perceived, especially from the person who has been painted, is rewarding and spurs me on.

Who inspires you and your work?

Watching the people around me do well, progress and succeed in their own endeavors. It’s inspiring to begin creating work, especially if I feel in a rut or insecure about my abilities. Realising I just need to begin and get out of my head.

Nick Cave said something along the lines of ‘you have to let it in, not let it out.’ When it comes to creativity it’s everywhere, you have to be open to letting it in.

So I try to keep that in mind and also engage with a lot of creative outputs that are completely different to my own to help generate ideas and feel motivated. Reading books, listening and playing to music.

I also enjoy researching every possible detail and rabbit hole of my idea. And then letting it all go out the window when I begin making. At the conceptual, brainstorming phase I think the work will be about one thing, but by the final stages of the making process it ends up articulating a lot more than the narrow idea I began with and that’s the best part.