A Geography of Colour is a monthly podcast with Ruth speaking with a different painter each month about their relationship with colour. The first series is complete and Ruth is now working on the next one. It is published on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Soundcloud. and it's on instagram @ageographyofcolour.
Also under the umbrella of A Geography of Colour as an artist-led project, Ruth undertakes painting residencies and takes part in events, where she visits various sites across the world for their resonance and connection to colour to make site specific work.
In May 2025 Ruth took the project Blue Cartographies: Bláar kortamyndir with A Geography of Colour: Landafræði lita to Seyisfjörour, Iceland to be part of Sluice's Expo World Building in association with LungA School there. She undertook a short residency at the LungA School and made a series of abstract paintings that look into Icelandic connections with the colour blue, it’s natural occurence in the landscape together with it’s use in the built environment. The paintings were exhibited in the Blue Church, Seyisfjörour during the Expo and one is now in a collection there. Sluice Seyðisfjörður is an international expo of artist and curator-led projects each addressing the concept of world-building as a means to explore how we build worlds within our own. How these re-imagined, alternative worlds reflect back at us our dissatisfaction with the world as-is and points towards utopic/ dystopic alternates. We recognise the danger of the current historical moment, and also its potential. Rallying under the title Sluice Seyðisfjörður: World-Building, 17 projects exhibited over 200 artists in 11 venues around Seyðisfjörður in May 2025.
Also under the umbrella of A Geography of Colour as an artist-led project, Ruth undertakes painting residencies and takes part in events, where she visits various sites across the world for their resonance and connection to colour to make site specific work.
In May 2025 Ruth took the project Blue Cartographies: Bláar kortamyndir with A Geography of Colour: Landafræði lita to Seyisfjörour, Iceland to be part of Sluice's Expo World Building in association with LungA School there. She undertook a short residency at the LungA School and made a series of abstract paintings that look into Icelandic connections with the colour blue, it’s natural occurence in the landscape together with it’s use in the built environment. The paintings were exhibited in the Blue Church, Seyisfjörour during the Expo and one is now in a collection there. Sluice Seyðisfjörður is an international expo of artist and curator-led projects each addressing the concept of world-building as a means to explore how we build worlds within our own. How these re-imagined, alternative worlds reflect back at us our dissatisfaction with the world as-is and points towards utopic/ dystopic alternates. We recognise the danger of the current historical moment, and also its potential. Rallying under the title Sluice Seyðisfjörður: World-Building, 17 projects exhibited over 200 artists in 11 venues around Seyðisfjörður in May 2025.
Pasture is an artist led project space that Ruth has set up at Braybrooks, an old dairy in Ballingdon and her live work space, next to the water meadows in Sudbury, Suffolk. She offers the space for artists, writers and creatives to come and research, make work and immerse themselves in the surrounding landscape. Set in the Stour Valley, historically inspirational to artists such as Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, Cedric Morris, Lett Haines and John Nash, the aim is to nurture and inspire work.
Making Ground , a project that explores colour physically as a material for paint and metaphysically, looking the emotional power of colour and artists' relationships with it. Ruth did a residency at PADA Studios, Barreiro, Portugal in 2022 responding to the post industrial landscape, using the sites of the derelict Sotinco paint factory and historic housing in the city as a site specific colour palette. Ruth's interest lies in both site as a material source for painting and in the immaterial or unconscious connections that can be made.
We Are The Weather, a research participatory art/science project explores ideas of weather, connecting internal and external weather as a metaphor for mental health and wellbeing. It uses the Manchester Colour Wheel, devised by Professor Peter Whorwell and Doctor Helen Carruthers to initiate conversations about mental health and explore ways of developing a sense of equilibrium and wellbeing in connection with support offered by a range of mental health organisations and providers. An initial residency at the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, Suffolk in 2017 explored colour, light and sound with participants on the beach. The external weather was brought into the Lookout through a camera obscura, a cyanometer was used to assess sky colour and daily weather recorded by participants as painted postcards. They also registered their internal weather or mood using the Manchester Colour Wheel. The colours from the colour wheel were translated into light and sound with a projection of a light piece from the Lookout Tower at night, in effect exchanging the internal and external weather. Follow this on instagram @wearetheweather, Twitter and Facebook We Are The Weather
Ruth is working on Fabric: Silk Road a cultural, ethnographic and textile project exploring silk on the Silk Road. She was awarded a British Council Artists' International Development Fund grant to undertake a research trip to China in 2018, taking silk from the Gainsborough Silk Weaving company in Sudbury to Artall Cultural Industries, Nanjing; she visited sericulture plants, silk mills and museums. In 2019 Ruth coordinated the first Sudbury Silk Festival and showed a short film about silk production from her trip to China, this can be see on Vimeo here. The plan for Fabric: Silk Road is a journey along the Silk Road from Xi'an, China to the UK visiting silk mills, museums and communities along the route, to collect silk and make documentary research to show in silk museums and communities connected with weaving on the little known Silk Road in the UK.
Film projects include The River Runs Through Us 2018, a collaborative project with sound artist Stuart Bowditch and people and communities along the River Stour in Cambridgeshire, Essex and Suffolk. It included walks, swims and a film that toured along the river during summer 2018, with an installation and exhibition at the National Trust, Flatford walks together with a book Stour, supported by Arts Council England and Dedham Vale AONB & Stour Valley Project. Watch the film on YouTube here. This project led to the River Stour Festival, which Ruth coordinated from 2018-22, supported by Dedham Vale AONB & Stour Valley Project and included an annual day on PLACE with the Essex Book Festival. Also to the Lighthouse 2015, where Ruth spent several years recording it from a working lighthouse, its decommissioning in 2013 and gradual decay and erosion by the sea until its demolition in 2020.