Ruby Barrowman

My practice explores how drawing, painting, and collage can be used to help respond to repeated processes of looking at my everyday environments. Working between abstraction and figuration, I use drawing and painting to investigate how ordinary objects, routes and encounters can be transformed through repetition, material process, and mark marking. Through this process, I build connections with the visual signs and stories that come from my daily life, with my drawings and paintings functioning as a visual diary.

I am interested in the physical act of painting itself, layering, correction, gesture and collage. I make marks and erase marks to allow paintings to remain open, unresolved, and visibly constructed. Much of how my work begins is through observational drawing around the places I live, work and go to, before gradually shifting into more instinctive and process-led forms of making.