Header Image: BA, Ink Jet Print, 2016.
Ruth Frances Graham - ArtistRuth Graham was born in Liverpool in the UK in the 1960’s and migrated to Fremantle in Australia when she was 5 years old. In the 1990’s she began a visual arts career after a TAFE Diploma in Art and Design working as a sculptor, painter and mixed media artist in WA. Graham's work was then influenced by the art in the Western Australian State Gallery, PICA and the active arts community that she was associated with there. She admired post modern Venezuelan hybrid, Spanish and native American arts especially like that of Juan Davila and that style is still evident in the work of Valerie Hegarty, Andrea Hegeman, Leo Ferdinando Demetz and Marisol Escobar. After meeting Nalda Searles in WA Graham was drawn to work in textiles and spent a year studying at Edith Cowan University in the early 1990's. In 1995 she moved to Alice Springs where she spent several years teaching, sharing ideas about art, basket making , textiles and developing grass sculpture. This development was largely due to associations made when working with NT aboriginal social services. After 6 years in the NT where Ruth Graham was part of a creative aboriginal and colonial art scene she moved to Adelaide to study and focus on her work. Graham says knowledge and understanding of social work has enhanced her art and she finds that there are means through the arts that bring people together in ways which allow them to express feelings about situations that are not appreciated enough. Today Ruth Graham is integrating new skills into her evolutionary sociological perspective to be more of an artist than a human service worker or teacher. She has been producing sculptures, paintings and baskets in Perth and Adelaide over the last 16 years. Now she is returning to her own European, Scottish and English roots intellectually to find ways of producing a hybrid art style that is more about her identity rather than concern about colonial Australia. Ruth Graham is passionate about the work of Frank Auerbach, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Van Dyck, Holman Hunt, and Wang Guangyi. Ruth Graham has moved away from basket making and textile art to focus on contemporary image making that integrates pop art and activism as a way to lighten up politically laden issues towards a more humane or moral society.
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Ha: Liberate in Perpetuum, Ink Jet Print, 2016.
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Ruth Frances Graham Artist
Contemporary Visual art
new work being created beginning - 2016