Ruby Wilkinson

Ruby Wilkinson is a painter based in Pōneke whose work explores emotional and sensory experience through abstraction. A graduate of Massey University’s School of Art in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, Wilkinson has developed a practice grounded in material experimentation and intuitive process.

Wilkinson’s paintings evoke moments of intimacy, reflection, and connection through movement, colour, and gesture. Her palette echoes the landscapes that have shaped her: the misty blues and stormy greys of Wellington’s South Coast, where she now lives, and the earthy greens of the Titirangi bush where she grew up. Rather than depicting specific scenes, her works create atmospheric and emotional spaces—fleeting impressions. Her compositions often suggest transitions: where beginnings and endings blur, where something fleeting is briefly held. These works invite a slow and attentive looking, allowing the viewer to sense rather than decode.

Her brushwork, scrubbed and feathered, traces physical gestures akin to dance or daily ritual. Layers of paint are applied and pulled back through a tactile process of addition and removal, revealing the surface’s history and creating a tension between presence and absence. Though abstract, her works follow a distinct rhythm, where the hint of a figure or a landscape flickers in and out of view.

Wilkinson describes painting as "resistance"—a way of slowing down time and metabolising experience. For her, the act becomes a form of non-verbal storytelling—gestural, poetic, and grounded in the physical. In a world saturated with instant messages, her work offers space to pause, feel, and recollect.