Ruth Murray: The Blue Hour at Old Bank Residency
Creative Tourist
The Blue Hour is Ruth Murray’s second show inspired by the work of Jean Rhys. This exhibition takes its name from Jean Rhys’s favourite perfume, L’Heure Bleue, a melancholic fragrance intended to evoke Paris at dusk. According to Lilian Pizzichini’s biography, while Jean Rhys saw herself as an underdog by day, the blue hour was when she became a wolf. Underneath the mannered surface lurks a predator, and wolves hunt best during twilight. She was always concerned with what lay beneath the top notes.
Ruth Murray’s paintings are about the experiences of women – most of her paintings are of women in a scene. Sometimes the viewer is confronted with enigmatic behaviours (there’s always something private and inaccessible about the subjects); and at other times rituals, symbols and tokens are used to disrupt the reading of the image. It’s not a radical effect: more a gentle skewing. Sometimes it’s the slightest gesture that feels most significant.
