Ruth Philo

Ruth's paintings explore abstraction through colour, light and surface; work combines inner and outer worlds, with conscious and unconscious elements.  Sometimes emerging from experiences of place and walking, the paintings convey a sensory experience whilst also being concerned with the materiality of paint and process. The scale is often intimate, working 'face to face' with the viewer and there is a sense of touch rather than gesture.  As Maurice Merleau Ponty wrote 'How would the painter or poet express anything other than his (her) encounter with the world' G A Johnson 'The Merleau Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy & Painting' (Northwestern University Press, Illinois, 1993:176)

Regularly exhibiting in the UK and abroad, Ruth works from a studio in Sudbury, Suffolk. She is a member of Contemporary British Painting and also curates shows including Lines for Agnes (2015).  She has had work selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and has work in collections in the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, USA, New Zealand, and China. She has undertaken residencies in China, Portugal and will take part in the Mark Rothko 2023 International Painting Symposium and Residency at the Mark Rothko Centre, Daugvapils, Latvia. Ruth has an MA in Fine Art, Norwich University of the Arts, a BA in History of Art, University of Warwick and is represented by Gallery Attache on Artsy, Rise Art,  Cobbold & and  Judd Fine Art.

​In 2022-23 Ruth received an Arts Council England Develop Your Creative Practice Award for 'Making Ground' a project about colour and paint, involving a residency at PADA, Portugal and conversations with painters about their relationship with colour that can be heard on Ruth's podcast A Geography of Colour.

Projects connected with place and placemaking also form part of Ruth's practice, engaging with audiences through events, walking, & film/installation. She is working on Fabric: Silk Road,  with sound artist Stuart Bowditch, a cultural and ethnographic exchange making connections between the silk mills of Sudbury, Suffolk and the silk industry and traditions along the Silk Road from China back to the UK.  They undertook a research trip to the eastern end of the Silk Road in China in October 2018, supported by a British Council Artist's International Development Fund Grant. She is currently researching the UK Silk Road. Ruth worked on a film | walks | swim project The River Runs Through Us  with Stuart Bowditch on the River Stour in Cambridgeshire, Essex and Suffolk with a film tour along the river in the summer of 2018, funded by Arts Council England and Dedham Vale AONB.  This acted as a seed project for the River Stour Festival , an annual year long festival along the river, from the source to the sea which ran from 2018 to 2022. In 2020 she set up Pasture  a new project space based in Braybrooks, an old dairy in Ballingdon, next to the ancient water meadows in Sudbury, Suffolk, offering a space for artists, musicians, writers and other creatives to come and think, make work and immerse themselves in the surrounding landscape.