In the series 'Seven questions with...' Art UK speaks to some of the most exciting emerging and established artists working today.

Ruth Murray's paintings, which are rich in detail, are mysterious and unsettling. Interested in the experiences of women and the spaces they occupy, Murray probes what it means to present public and private personas. She is especially interested in water and associated ideas of reflection, as well as what lies beneath – or the sense of a deeper spiritual realm lurking under the surface.

Her current exhibition, 'Byron's Pond' at the Garden Museum, London, presents a recent body of work looking at the relationship between women and water, alongside an examination of gardens as fertile, communal spaces. The exhibition's title references a secluded spot of water which Lord Byron and Virginia Woolf frequently visited; literature often informs Murray's work.

Born in Birmingham in 1984, Murray graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2008 and was the Derek Hill Scholar at the British School at Rome. Notable exhibitions include Northern Stars at the A Foundation, Saatchi's 4 New Sensations, The Creative Cities Collection at the Barbican and the BP Portrait Award. She won the Jackson's Painting Prize in 2020 and she was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2019.

I talked to Murray about landscape, her artistic influences and the patterns in her paintings.

Imelda Barnard: Your exhibition, 'Byron's Pond' at the Garden Museum seeks to challenge traditional representations of women in nature. Why do you think this is important and what does nature represent in your work?

2018, oil on canvas by Ruth Murray (b.1984)

Ruth Murray: Nature, for me, often serves as a bridge to the past – an enduring presence that links us to history, myth, and fairy tales. I grew up in Birmingham, which has a strong connection to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and via the city museum and Barber institutes' collections, these paintings were amongst my earliest influences. I liked how the Pre-Raphaelites used nature to revisit medieval and biblical narratives, and how they explored identity and human experience this way.

Women were generally used as a subject for mens' interests though, for example bathing, with the threat of sexual violence, naked or dead. Or sometimes the clothing would be unsuitable – big impractical rococo dresses – constraining these women to manicured gardens.

In my work, I focus on the experiences of women, drawing from my own life. For my exhibition at the Garden Museum, I've been exploring how gardens, however small, can function as spaces of refuge and connection amidst urban life. These spaces offer a sense of peace and solace.

The paintings often blend the personal with the communal, the mundane with the transcendent. In works such as Debdale, for example, the reflection of a friend in a reservoir becomes almost otherworldly, suggesting a connection to myths like the Lady of Shalott. Through these associations, I aim to show nature as both a witness to our lives and a storyteller, enriching our personal experiences with timeless themes that continue to resonate.

Imelda: In what ways do your paintings reflect your own encounters with landscape?

Ruth: My paintings are often prompted by an encounter with a landscape, and these experiences often emerge from places, objects, people, or stories I come across. While I find inspiration in various forms, the landscape – particularly in unfamiliar or temporary settings – has a profound impact on my work.

At the end of 2016, I spent three months on a residency in Bergen, Norway. I was faced with the impossibility of representing the Norwegian landscapes. My response was to photograph lots of little details of nature, always at the human scale – the same scale I use when I make paintings of domestic spaces. Duff (2018) is the main painting I created from this time.

It excerpts part of the forest floor corresponding to the space around the subject, who is enmeshed in it, but whose focus is out of frame. The painting doesn't disclose the hidden thoughts of the subject, whose behaviour is enigmatic, and this makes her as inaccessible as the rest of the scene that is cropped out by the canvas. That, in effect, is my version of the landscape.

I've taken a small section of the forest floor and put it up on the wall. It's really big and yet covers such a small area, with the vastness of the mountains and forests that surround it all implied beyond the canvas.

If you look closely at the painting you can see there is a lot of pattern and light in that complex lattice. I love painting organic forms like this, that transform into patterns and shapes that you can get lost in.

Imelda: Your paintings primarily focus on the experiences of women, often in specific spaces. In what ways are you concerned with exploring the psychology of both the women and spaces you depict?

Ruth: Yes, my paintings are about the experiences of women and most of my paintings are of women in a scene. Sometimes I use these women to evoke feelings of alienation and paranoia, or to explore issues around one's self-conception or social position. There is a tense feeling to some of the paintings, but I also look for the quiet beauty in mourning or isolation, so there can be a kind of languorous, contemplative aspect to them as well.

2021, oil on canvas by Ruth Murray (b.1984)

My paintings often deal with the constraining pressure imposed by external narratives. Such combinations don't simply reduce to sexual politics, but rather one approach can refract and inhabit the other. It's not a radical effect: more a gentle skewing. Sometimes it's the slightest gesture that feels most significant.

During the pandemic, I created a chromatic series, featuring women in domestic interiors, inspired by a house I'd recently bought – a Victorian terrace in Manchester – and the contemporary lives of me and my colleagues. The women in these paintings were linked by coincidence of name and place. For example, Blue Rosie depicts two of my ex-colleagues, Rosy and Rosie.

2019, oil on canvas by Ruth Murray (b.1984)

They're posed in the wintery window of my home in Gorton. This well-worn view appears again in Everything is Green, but now in full bloom.

2020, oil on canvas by Ruth Murray (b.1984)

In Ruby, a parlour-like living space has been recreated in the style of a Félix Vallotton painting. Again, two of my ex-colleagues are depicted – a Ruby from each of my jobs.

This series had several references to famous male painters; but each time the mood is distorted, tense and uncertain. The subjects' private thoughts are not as easily interpreted, the tropes of bourgeois comfort less reassuring. I think paintings of women in domestic interiors had an additional resonance during the pandemic too, when we all spent longer contemplating the physical contours of home.

Imelda: Why are you drawn to bodies of water – are you making a wider point about moments of private reflection?

Ruth: My most recent body of work has been looking at the relationship between women and bodies of water.

2023, oil on linen by Ruth Murray (b.1984)

My work sometimes has a literary starting point, and this series was partially inspired by a short story by Oscar Wilde, The Fisherman and his Soul. The story uses an allegory of the little mermaid to explore the Christian conflict between heart and soul. The fisherman separates himself from his soul so that he can live with the mermaid, then once a year for three years the soul returns from traveling the world to try and tempt him to leave his love. We usually think of the soul as being insubstantial. The story plays with the idea of the soul having a physical manifestation, and shadows/reflections offering snatched glimpses into a spiritual realm.

In the painting November's Song, I took my friend Rosy out on a canoe on our local reservoir. The leaves had recently turned yellow, and on a crisp wintery day, they were creating patterns, like gold, on the surface of the water, with Rosy's strange reflection distorted by the ripples.

I had also recently rediscovered a Peter Doig painting Reflection (What does your soul look like?) (the title apparently taken from a DJ Shadow tune). I was struck by the use of the surface of water to explore a transition from one world to another and, through the interference patterns of reflections and shadows, create portal-like distortions as if emanating from the semi-conscious netherworld.

Imelda: I'm struck by the uncanny, disturbing quality of your paintings, which is heightened by your realistic style – Floyen (2021), for example, features a woman lying on a tangled forest floor. Are your works deliberately elusive or open-ended?

Ruth: I am excited by light and colour, and love how the fleeting playful nature of this can, paradoxically, add a sort of melancholy to the thing it's depicting. Sometimes I'll confront the viewer with enigmatic behaviours (there's always something private and inaccessible about the subjects); and at other times I'll use rituals, symbols and tokens to disrupt the reading of the image.

Sometimes, as with Floyen, it's the dynamic patterns and shapes that take centre stage, leaving a stationary, solitary protagonist seeming distant, bored, trapped or lost. I always hope that my work might have a humanistic resonance, contributing to our understanding of today's world, and how we continuously redefine our place within that world. And despite vying for attention with the surroundings, it's the hidden thoughts and the psychology of the situation that interests me most.

Imelda: Byron and Virginia Woolf have informed your Garden Museum show. You've touched on some artistic influences, but could you talk more about your art historical inspiration? Do you see yourself as working in a painting tradition?

Ruth: Yes, I see myself as working within a painting tradition, though one that's informed by both historical and contemporary influences. Looking to the past for inspiration enriches my process, particularly when it comes to composition.

Peter Doig's Blotter, Pierre Bonnard's Dining Room in the Country, and Paula Rego's The Dance are all formative pieces that I return to regularly. Each artist offers a different understanding of colour, form, and the emotional tension within a scene. Their use of space, atmosphere, and narrative resonates with me.

Literature also plays a big role in my work. Often, I start with a narrative or an idea drawn from literature that speaks to me, particularly stories involving complex female characters. The work for 'Byron's Pond', for example, follows on from a series of works focused on domestic interiors and the notion of the 'unhinged woman,' drawing from the lives of women like Jean Rhys, Léopoldine Hugo, Adèle Hugo and Camille Claudel. This evolved when I began exploring the relationship between women and nature – particularly water and gardens.

Woolf's connection to this theme became significant, especially considering the poignancy of her death, in which she filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the river Ouse. It seemed fitting to connect her tragic end with the idea of women, water, and secluded spaces like the gardens of the Bloomsbury Group, where she often found solace.

Sometimes the references seem unavoidable – for example, the painting Duff (illustrated above), and John Everett Millais' Ophelia, from Shakespeare's play Hamlet.

I explored the tragic narrative of female madness and drowning more directly in Puddle. In this work, I depict myself in a shallow pool of water on a hill in Orkney, a deliberate nod to Ophelia's iconic imagery. I blend elements of everyday life with these high cultural references, creating a narrative that's at once personal and universal.

Oil on cradled panel by Ruth Murray (b.1984)

While I often have an internal, ongoing narrative that informs my work, I don't always expect the viewer to know all of the layers of reference. Instead, I hope the ambiguity leaves space for the viewer to engage with the emotional and visual elements on their own terms.

Imelda: Can you talk about how you approach a work – do you begin with an idea, or work from photographs for example? And how do you approach your medium?

Ruth: As mentioned, my paintings are prompted by encounters. When something catches my attention I'll think through some of its formal aspects/compositional considerations and usually let it percolate for a while until all the elements fall into place. I then stage and direct the scenes from which I work using the materials, people, and locations around me, and work from photographs back at the studio, drawing out and transforming them into something more significant. These are frequently rich, intense environments that when translated in paint can become almost claustrophobic, or uneasy.

I work slowly and spend a lot of time deliberating over choices of arrangement and scale. The big paintings in particular are months' long commitment. The Firs is the largest work I've created to date, measuring 270 by 180 centimetres. This scale presented some logistical challenges; manoeuvring the piece and trying to reach both the top and bottom were tricky.

2025, oil on linen by Ruth Murray (b.1984)

I love working on a large scale because it allows you to be completely immersed in the scene. The painting depicts the University of Manchester's Botanical Research Centre, known as 'The Firs', with its beautiful, expansive greenhouses. We were granted access after hours, it was very atmospheric in the dark, containing the light. I felt the scale of the painting was essential to capturing it.

Imelda Barnard, Commissioning Editor, modern and contemporary British art at Art UK

'Ruth Murray: Byron's Pond' is at the Garden Museum, London, until 27th April 2025

This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation