Ruby Waage Townsend navigates the intricate realms of human duality, perception, and narrative through the medium of figurative painting, weaving worlds within her artistic practice. She tells truths through dishonesty, merging the lines between comedy and tragedy, the beautiful and the grotesque, with paintings themselves acting as confidantes, holding truths behind the protective and illusory nature of paint. Embracing enchanted realism, she narrates personal experiences of repression, judgment, and surveillance, portraying characters as cut-out paper dolls in traditional Dutch attire, drawing on her heritage. The physical process and rawness of using the jigsaw violently cuts through the painterly veil, both using and creating a jigsaw as she pieces together fragments of memories and histories.
She interrogates the notion of domestic sanctuary, positioning viewers as both observers and participants in themes of abuse and control. Rejecting the archetypal binary nature of fairy tales, Townsend subverts this to explore messy ambiguities and the role of the narrator. She is the main character in her own book, utilizing the self-portrait as she encompasses all roles, finding a sense of freedom and self-reliance in the sanctuary of her own face, her trusted companion. Powerful and powerless, the protagonist and antagonist, clones of her deepest emotions.