Softly Held

Solo exhibition by Ruby Bovill

Brunswick Street Gallery, Naarm / Melbourne
May 7 - 24 2026

Opening celebration May 8
6pm - 8pm.



This new body of work reflects Ruby Bovill’s deep, immersive inquiry into relational connection—shaped by lived experience and intuition. Alongside her painting practice, the past fourteen months have seen Bovill work therapeutically with young people and their caregivers, supporting processes of reconnection after experiences of violence or significant relational rupture. Within these spaces, connection is slowly rebuilt—through attunement, presence, and care. This relational language has quietly permeated in the studio. Through an intuitive process of mark-making, abstract, flower-like forms began to emerge—soft, opening, reaching, folding back. They appear in motion, responsive to one another, at times drifting close, at others holding distance. Each gesture negotiates its place in relation to the other.

In this sense, the act of art-making itself becomes relational. Bovill enters into dialogue with the canvas—listening, responding, misstepping and repairing. Like all relationships, the process asks a willingness to sit in uncertainty. The works hold a quiet tension between fragility and resilience, separation and connection. Through this lens, creativity mirrors the dynamics of human connection.

Bovill acknowledges that these works were created on stolen land. She pays respect to the Traditional Owners and custodians of the land, waterways and skies on which she lives and works—the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation—and recognises that sovereignty was never ceded.


View online here: Brunswick Street Gallery - Softly Held

View PDF catalogue here: Ruby Bovill - Catalouge