Ruby Waage-Townsend

Ruby Waage Townsend (b.1996) is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Leicester, UK. Her work explores identity, trauma, and domestic environments—blending everyday settings with dreamlike aesthetics to examine facades, illusions, and the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction.

Raised in the UK and of Dutch heritage, Townsend’s practice is influenced by folklore, familial memory, and mythology. Through painting, performance, and installation, she constructs visual narratives that make the ephemeral tangible and the personal universal.

Rooted in themes of domestic performativity, dualism, and the psychological aftermath of trauma, her work often draws on lived experiences, particularly those shaped by domestic abuse. Influenced by Carl Jung’s notion of the psyche as a self-contained theatre, she builds rich psychodramas through world-building methodologies—combining painting, set design, costume, and soundscape.

Townsend’s visual language is grounded in enchanted realism, weaving together fairy tales and personal stories to reflect on intergenerational memory, power, and myth. Her work frequently occupies liminal roles: between protagonist and antagonist, audience and performer, illusion and truth.

During her residency at CMR Project Space, Townsend will immerse herself in Redruth’s folkloric landscape—where legends of giants, piskies, and bucca shape the cultural terrain. This mythic environment will influence her evolving personal mythology, as she continues to develop shape-shifting figures such as the Osseart: a punished demon said to haunt rivers and woodlands.

Throughout the residency, Townsend will gather stories, walk the landscape, and create sketches, paintings, and writings in response. Her time at CMR will culminate in a small exhibition and artist talk, sharing her process and reflecting on how Redruth’s stories will inform her future work.