Author Ella Baxter’s column Fever Point joins artists in the thick of their creative process and asks them what this obsessive, rigorous moment feels like for them, and just how they plan on sustaining it. For this instalment, Ella Baxter meets Ruth O’Leary.
It is early spring and everything is blossoming. I am waiting for Ruth outside her studio, watching two cabbage moths fornicate in front of my face.
Ruth arrives and we embrace, which is unusual for me. But I already feel like I know her. Ruth’s art is intimate, feminist, and subversive. By the time we meet, I have seen photographs of her lying naked in the barrel of an excavator, biological maps of her milk ducts, and several of her Abortion Dresses.
Inside her studio, she has set up two chairs opposite each other. When I sit, I face a giant photograph of her, naked and pregnant in a cemetery. Her pubic hair is at eye-level.
“Let me know if you want to go outside, if you feel cooped up in here, because it is a bit intense,” says Ruth.
Most nights, when she is not lecturing at a university over an hour away, Ruth rides her e-bike to this studio to work. During the day she homeschools her three children. Their births are listed on her CV, alongside more than ninety art works, exhibitions and awards she has generated in the same time period. She is 36.
“I am always making art in my body and my mind, it’s constantly gestating.”
I manage to ask three times if she’s only able to make art while her children sleep. Repeatedly, she tells me, ‘No.’
“I make work at the kitchen table…(art) is deep excavation and they are in it with me.”
I write when my son is at his father’s house. My phone is in another room, and I wear noise cancelling head phones. For close to a decade, I have believed that creativity requires extreme asceticism.
“I am always in that (obsessive) space because I always have deadlines. Between the gallery that represents me, the job, and the children’s needs – and we have goats and they are pregnant, and we also have rabbits, like a lot of them, that we eat…”
“So in the midst of this?”
“And chickens. There’s never a pause ever.”
“Your art is in all of it?”
“It’s in it. My art is in gazing into my pregnant goat’s eyes this morning… She’s so obviously pregnant, she’s really docile and dreamy and soft … I am thinking I need to make a goat artwork … I need to make a goat mask…Everything ties back to the art.”
After a break up in her twenties, Ruth used her clothes as a canvas, and began writing out everything she could not say that was to do with love; Fuck Casanova. Fuck daddy. Fuck cocks.
“Art is the common thread pulling me out of despair…If I’m grieving, I get busy.”
She wore the clothes to the opening of an art exhibition in lieu of submitting a piece of work.
“It was not an artwork; it was a thing I did.”
She began making the dresses for others (Fuck Chaos. Fuck Perfume). There was a spin-off of Fuck rice paper lamps (Fuck Big. Fuck God.) The Fuck Dresses were eventually curated into a show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
“I had no idea. They were in a garbage bag; I didn’t even present them nicely. I had Apollo (her son) on my hip and my mum dropped me off. It dawned on me… these are going in here?…At the time I was still getting people telling me I couldn’t be a mum and an artist and there I was at fucking ACCA with my dresses and my tiny baby.”
Before I leave, Ruth offers me a painting. She hands me a stack to pick from, and I choose a quiet watercolour of a mother and a baby, sleeping face to face. In the image, she has captured the haze of postpartum shock.
“I don’t have time to ever finish anything…it is a quarter of what I want to say. Every single show is like that. Every dress feels like that… I recognise now, that (feeling) feeds the next work.”
It is 2am and I cannot sleep. I open Ruth O’Leary’s Instagram. I have scrolled back to 2021 where she is on her hands and knees on the beach, two sons riding her like a horse. Within the same grid there is a portrait of a woman with eight breasts, and an image of her pregnant stomach coated in tangerine glitter. I can’t find the distinction: it is all her, or, it is all art. I don’t know.
