Ruby Lewis, b. 2001, currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom, having completed a Fine Arts Degree at Central Saint Martins in June 2023. Her practice centres around depicting a personal mythology that explores the changing and surreal landscapes found in fantasy, working primarily in painting and drawing.
Influenced by the folklore surrounding plants and literature, she constructs her own narrative inspired by these fables which evolve into visual portals suggesting access to another realm that can be sighted through seeing stones, the hollow in the bole of a tree and the veiled reality of a dream. Referencing her past experiences of places she had visited as a child, significant encounters recalled from memory, illustrative interpretations of her relationship with ongoing health issues and the oddities of obscure collected stories; she reinterprets these to create a bridge between lost characters and a hidden nature within a landscape whilst navigating the changing relationship between the physical and emotional space she inhabits, melding reality with a conjured vision.
This fusion of folkloric references encouraged her pieces to become portals to a landscape where reality, imagination and history converge. Exploring the natural experience of loss in all senses, Ruby depicts creatures attempting to access our world by breaking off from the landscape, escaping it physically or becoming disentangled from the narrative.
She prefers her work to be undefined. Her technique transforms for each narrative she creates, the works often stylistically adopt surrealism, and are inspired by the romantic French explorative works of Les Nabis. Insidiously unsettling scenery emphasises pictures of grief, which inhabit each of her works.