Ruby Waage Townsend
About
Ruby Waage Townsend is a UK based artist working across figurative oil painting, performance, and immersive world building. Drawing on folklore, feminism, and working class storytelling, their practice explores how myths are inherited, embodied, and rewritten, and how stories can both wound and heal.
Painting is the spine of Ruby’s work, but it rarely stands alone. Images emerge through drawing, costume, set building, and staged enactment, before settling into richly layered oil paintings that feel part theatre, part domestic fable. Figures slip between roles, time folds in on itself, and archetypes begin to fray. These paintings operate as psychological stages, where identity is unstable, performed, and quietly charged.
Folklore sits at the centre of the practice as a political and emotional language. Ruby approaches myth not as comfort, but as a site of tension, where class, gender, power, and survival are negotiated. As a survivor of gender based violence, they use folklore to disrupt binaries of good and evil, exposing the subtler mechanics of coercion, obedience, and resilience. Their work asks who gets cast as monster, who is expected to endure, and what happens when the story refuses to resolve neatly.
Colour and theatricality soften the edge without dulling it. Bright palettes, playful compositions, and moments of humour sit alongside unease, creating work that draws viewers in before asking them to stay with discomfort. Paintings often take on the logic of pop up books or enchanted rooms, spaces that appear inviting, only to reveal deeper psychological terrain.
Alongside their studio practice, Ruby works extensively in public and community contexts. Through residencies, workshops, and site responsive projects, they engage with local histories, shared memory, and collective storytelling. Recent projects include Love Letters to Ilkeston, a residency shaped by regional folklore and community voices. Ruby is currently completing an MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and is based in London.
At its core, Ruby’s work is an act of reclamation. Of stories. Of bodies. Of voices. Their practice honours what has been silenced, lingers in the unresolved, and imagines futures where care, resistance, and myth intertwine.
Biography
Ruby Waage Townsend (b.1996, Leicester, UK) is an interdisciplinary artist, world-weaver, fairytale writer & schildermanneke.
Working across painting, performance, installation, and myth, their practice treats painting as a performative act—one that conjures enchanted realism, unstable identities, and shifting power dynamics. Drawing on folklore, lived experience, and dark humour, Ruby creates immersive worlds where comedy and tragedy entwine, the beautiful brushes up against the grotesque, and fairytales are rewritten with prosthetic snouts and cabbage heads.
They are currently completing an MFA in Painting at The Slade School of Fine Art and graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art from De Montfort University in 2023. Ruby has undertaken residencies including AA2A at Loughborough University, Ilkeston Contemporary Arts, UK New Artists People, Place, Practice, and the CMR residency in Redruth, Cornwall.
Recent highlights include a commissioned portrait of Baroness Doreen Lawrence (2023) for De Montfort University. Their work is held in permanent and private collections including De Montfort University Board Room, Ilkeston Contemporary Arts, and Sir Peter Soulsby. They are a recipient of the Irving Wernick Scholarship and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant.
Alongside their studio practice, Ruby delivers workshops, curates exhibitions, and produces site responsive and community led projects with organisations including Ilkeston Contemporary Arts, UK New Artists, Soft Touch Arts, and Pedestrian. They are a member of the Working Class Creatives Database and live and work in London, UK.