Softly Held
Ruby Bovill
7–24 MAY
This new body of work reflects Ruby Bovill’s deep, immersive inquiry into relational connection—shaped by lived experience and intuition. Alongside her painting practice, the past fourteen months have seen Bovill work therapeutically with young people and their caregivers, supporting processes of reconnection after experiences of violence or significant relational rupture. Within these spaces, connection is slowly rebuilt—through attunement, presence, and care. This relational language has quietly permeated in the studio. Through an intuitive process of mark-making, abstract, flower-like forms began to emerge—soft, opening, reaching, folding back. They appear in motion, responsive to one another, at times drifting close, at others holding distance. Each gesture negotiates its place in relation to the other.
In this sense, the act of art-making itself becomes relational. Bovill enters into dialogue with the canvas—listening, responding, misstepping and repairing. Like all relationships, the process asks a willingness to sit in uncertainty. The works hold a quiet tension between fragility and resilience, separation and connection. Through this lens, creativity mirrors the dynamics of human connection.
Bovill acknowledges that these works were created on stolen land. She pays respect to the Traditional Owners and custodians of the land, waterways and skies on which she lives and works—the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation—and recognises that sovereignty was never ceded.
Ruby Bovill is a painter and art therapist based on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people in Melbourne / Naarm. Bovill’s work encourages quiet contemplation and reflection on connection to place. Bovill’s paintings are an abstraction of her environment and identity. Growing up in Melbourne and regularly visiting the Great Ocean Road and Murray river - childhood provided her with a connection to nature. Art Therapy transformed Bovill’s art making practice resulting in work that makes internal discoveries, heals and contributes to her sense of self.
Bovill graduated from a Double Bachelor of Arts and Visual Arts at Monash University in 2015. Since then Ruby completed a Masters of Art Therapy at LaTrobe University in 2018. Today, alongside her painting practice, Bovill works as an art therapist with survivors of family violence. Bovill is passionate about providing safe spaces for people to engage in creative modalities to reduce emotional distress, explore self, and recover from trauma.
