Ruth O'Leary on making your mark

Welcome to The Nugget, a 24k gold newsletter about Castlemaine's people and events

Author

The Nugget
February 13, 2026

★ Ruth O’Leary on making your mark★

Ruth O’Leary, photo Maddy Maeve

Remember me.

The words are stitched in thread beneath a neat alphabet on an 1866 needlework sampler from Chewton.

Ruth O’Leary found it while combing through the Castlemaine Art Museum’s collection for Groundswell, showing at CAM (March 21–29, free) as part of the State Festival.

The exhibition pairs historical objects — embroidery, ceramics, metalwork — with new work by nine local artists. The theme is change. Environmental, cultural, personal, political. The kind that builds from the ground up.

Ruth was drawn to the quieter revolutions.

“I was most attracted to the hidden stories of women in this area,” she says. “There are lots of conversations going right back through time, which I’ve never done in my practice before.”

She didn’t know, for example, that the museum was founded by women. Fanny Finch — whose voting card is in the collection — was new to her too. Finch, one of the first women in Australia to vote, has since found her way onto one of O’Leary’s painted dresses.

And then there was the sampler.

A school exercise, technically. Alphabet. Name. Date: 1866. And at the bottom, the instruction — or request — stitched in thread: Remember me.

“That was such a special thing to be able to find,” Ruth says. “She made this in 1866, and it’s still here. And now I get to remember her.”

She was struck by the sentiment, unusually direct for its time, and by the act itself.

“I’m playing with that original idea of this little lady at home doing embroidery,” she says. “And how she made it into a slightly transgressive experience. So much of it is just writing your name down, but it’s not writing, it’s stitching the name down.

“There is something about that that I see as this feminine act of resistance. It has hidden charge because it takes time to make your mark.”

The sampler is now the subject of one of 20 painted dresses Ruth created for the exhibition — “dresses for change,” she calls them — honouring women recorded in the archive and those who weren’t, including Dja Dja Wurrung women who were here long before the museum.

For an artist whose practice largely unfolded in Melbourne, working with local material is a dream.

“It’s just been so special to make work about this town that I live in,” she says. “I mainly show in Melbourne and my practice kind of exists in that urban context.”

Painted dresses have been with her for years. It began, as many good ideas do, with a breakup. As an art student, fresh out of romance and patience, she made a dress that read: “Fuck anything to do with Love.”

She wore it to a show called Lovers in the Car Parking Lot, staged in a city lot where people drank wine and made out. She was embarrassed. Then people asked her to make them one.

She’s been making dresses ever since, as paintings, as performances, as wearable declarations.

Later, she found Tyson. Unlike previous partners, he wanted a baby too.

“I always wanted to be a mother, from when I was 16,” she says. “I pleaded with every boyfriend but no one ever wanted to have a baby as a teenager.”

She was 26 when she had her first child, younger than many of her peers.

“I had a bit of a crisis because I could no longer go to the club and take drugs anymore."

(I will pause here to say that I love Ruth. That is all.)

"I felt very isolated, but also really empowered because it suited me, being a mother. It was something I really longed for.”

Her work shifted. She had less money, less time and no studio.

The art world had opinions.

“I had a male dealer say, when I was a new mum, not to make work about motherhood because it’s something that women do and they regret it,” she says.

“It just felt like this no-go zone, which of course made me really want to make work about motherhood.”

One of her early photo booth works with her baby boy — exploring gaze, identity and the female body that had housed a male one — has since been acquired by the NGV for Mother, opening in March. It will sit alongside works by Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and Patricia Piccinini.

“When you’re a young artist, you can’t imagine being in a state institution,” she says. “It’s so special because one day I’ll be dead and my son can take his children to see their grandmother in the collection.”

Ruth left Melbourne for country life seven years ago. First Daylesford, now Castlemaine. Cheaper rent and a second pregnancy prompted the move from Clifton Hill. Castlemaine stuck for practical reasons — a train line; she doesn’t drive — and for the creative air.

“I love living here so much,” she says. “We’ve only been here for two years, and I’m just amazed by the creative output of this regional town.”

Within a week of moving, she says, her practice felt reignited. Two studio precincts in a country town, she notes, is unheard of.

There is mega momentum. Last year she had 13 exhibitions. Over the next six weeks, three open back-to-back.

She is deep in a residency with La Trobe Art Institute and Punctum in Bendigo, building a large-scale “dress monument” designed, ultimately, to collapse.

The work, which opens on Saturday, asks who gets a pedestal and why permanence is reserved for some histories and not others. The monument is deliberately precarious: tent poles, painted fabric, text. A structure that will stand and fall.

As summer shifts into autumn, Ruth returns to her everyday. She homeschools her children. She teaches at RMIT. She makes art at night. Her studio is two minutes and 37 seconds away by e-bike. She connects with other artists in the supermarket.

Ruth doesn’t say what she wants viewers to feel when they see her work. She just hopes they feel something.

Even discomfort will do.

  • Listen to our interview with Ruth on MainFM and learn how she ended up tagging the walls of the NGV years before her work would be hung on the walls of the gallery

  • Book tickets to see Ruth’s public presentation of her work for Punctum Experiments in Live Arts, Sat, 14 Feb, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

  • Read more about Ruth’s solo show for Melbourne Art Fair with her gallery Mary Cherry Contemporary

  • Find out more about Groundswell, the exhibition at Castlemaine Art Museum for Castlemaine State Festival

❀ Shout a membership ❀

The Harcourt Football Netball Club is offering a lovely and direct way to help local residents.

You can “shout” a 2026 membership for someone in the community who is doing it tough or working hard to support others.

This is about more than footy and netball. It’s a way to open the door to connection and a few hours of normality when life is upside down.

Instagram Post

♡˖ Events ˖♡

𖥔 TALK TO MOI PLOISE 𖥔

Hi, hi! If you would like to write for the Nugget, we have good news.

We are taking submissions.

The Nugget showcases stories about the people who make our community so magical.

Send your submission to [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you. xx