Plimoth interior with velvet flames, 2025, oil and acrylic on velvet inlaid dropcloth, 18 x 24 inches
Goodly ear, 2025, oil on birch panel, 11 x 14 inches
Portrait of the artist as a farm animal, 2025, oil and acrylic on panel with artist’s frame, 20 x 23 inches
Chalice with storm pushing in, 2025, dye, acrylic, and oil with beaded and machine embroidery on silk, 48 x 48 inches
Sorrow to seed, 2025, acrylic with beaded and machine embroidery on silk inlaid velvet, 12 x 12 inches
Sorrow to action, 2025, acrylic on silk and appliqued velvet, 18 x 24 inches
Feral letter, 2025, oil and acrylic on silk, 18 x 24 inches
Floating fortress, 2025, oil and acrylic on birch panel, 11 x 14 inches
Devil’s kernel, 2025, oil on birch panel, 11 x 14 inches
Press Release
Wellfleet, MA (October, 2025) – Farm Projects is pleased to present Wooded to the Brink of the Sea, Ruby T’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Developed during three years the artist spent living in Provincetown, MA, these painted and drawn expanded landscapes spring out of the observational into what is felt, sensed, and fantasized.
On layered substrates of silk, drop cloth, velvet, and embroidery, along with the occasional wood panel, Ruby’s paintings move in and out of abstraction, at times distilling into an image: a quick smattering of daisies; a rainbow-tinted ear of rotten corn; or in the case of Plimoth interior with velvet flames, sharply lit realism. In the gallery’s inner room, her drawings of waves, plant life, and imagined scenarios wrap the walls.
The exhibition’s title is taken from Mourt’s Relation, a 1622 account of the Pilgrims’ arrival on Cape Cod. In it, the peninsula is described as “wooded to the brink of the sea,” a phrase both lush and foreboding.
For the artist, this description invokes a mournful inquiry: How did Nauset and Wampanoag stewardship shape the land prior to colonization, and what was lost when European settlers clear-cut old growth forests? How do we contact the sublime in the midst of ongoing land theft and climate catastrophe?
Long mythologized as the Pilgrims’ first landing site and later as a haven for queer freedom, the Outer Cape is entangled in dispossession and liberation alike. Ruby situates herself via a cryptic iconography of vines, X’s, flowers, and corn– twisting through incongruous realms of fear and desire.
“Painting, like history, both reveals and limits my expression of freedom,” writes Ruby T. “The works in this show are best encountered as experiments in approximating devotion; fantasy patched to a fever dream, hottening in the sea.”
Please note that five percent of all sales from the exhibition will be donated to the Aquinnah Cultural Center. Located on Martha’s Vineyard, Aquinnah Cultural Center is at the forefront of protecting, preserving, and stewarding Aquinnah Wampanoag art and culture into the future.