Secrets From the Sink: Artist Ruby Millichamp sculpts portraits through bathroom sinks
Half empty toothpaste lay scattered across the bathroom sink. Waxing strips and makeup products sit ajar. Used tissues and condoms thrown across the sink haphazardly reveal moments of the night before. Prescription medication and half smoked cigarettes line the edges of the porcelain basin.
Often unnoticed, bathrooms are perhaps one of the most intimate and yet communal spaces in a household. For Fine Arts Master’s student Ruby Millichamp, the secrets that a bathroom sink can spill about a person is fascinating. The objects left lying around the bathroom sink all tell a story about the people who left them there.
“When you go to parties, everyone enjoys a wee snoop around the shit that lingers in people's bathrooms. I like to think everyone’s secretly doing it.”
Exploring the concept of a sink’s secrets, Ruby sculpted five sinks for her Bachelor’s project, Confessions from the Can. Each sink is littered with everything from toothpaste and razors, to condoms and tissues. These scattered objects create everyday characters and reveal the hidden facets of their personalities.
Working with unfired clay, cardboard, and finds from the local tip shop, Ruby sculpts portraits of people, without showing the people themselves. Many often recognise themselves in the details, confessing which pieces remind them of their own.
Ruby recalls one friend proudly recognising himself in The Bachelor — a sink riddled with tissues, condom, lube, a joint and a stray cigarette hanging off the edge. What began as a moment of recognition quickly turning into a confessional as he launched into a tangent about his life and relationships. She laughs remembering the moment, “People really see themselves in the artwork. Like, man, you don’t need to tell me all this.”
Before turning to sculpture, Ruby was a Photography student. However, she felt limited in this craft and wanted to reach beyond the lens to build the sets she wanted to capture. “It didn’t feel as impactful to me to just take a photo of the bench or the sink. I didn’t feel like I had done enough labour in it.”
Absurdity and satirical humour is central to Ruby’s work, leaning into slapstick comedy, making the mundane feel fresh. She loves handmaking her work in all its quirky glory.
“Not everything has to be perfect to be valid,” she says. “It makes sense for it to be kind of shit, kind of obvious, kind of cartoony.”
Now working on her Master’s project, Ruby turns her attention away from the privacy of bathrooms to public spaces we’re forced to share. Taking her craft outside the home, her new work captures snapshots from our regular commutes and shared routines. From the moments spent on cramped buses, the passive aggressive notes left in office kitchens, to the quiet of waiting rooms.
These spaces are so familiar that they’re almost invisible — yet they are almost unavoidable in our daily life. “I’m interested in the places we frequent every day. The ones that you have to be in even when you don’t want to be.”
“They’re still about people, but they’re not as tied to people’s specific personalities,” she says. “It’s more about how we interact with spaces, and the awkward rules we use when we’re together.”
By crafting these communal scenes — whether it’s on a bus or in a bathroom — Ruby reveals glimpses of who we are and how we interact with each other.
Now she’s working on developing the artwork further through stop motion. Set to a soundtrack composed by a friend, she’s turning a routine shopping trip into a whole new animated scene.
Through caricature and confessions, Ruby’s work beckons us to look closer at the mundane moments which quietly shape our sense of selves. Her art acts as a mirror.
The unnoticed, everyday objects left by your sink whisper confessions in silence. Makeup, tissues, condoms, cigarettes — each one is a relic. Each one is spilling fragments of who you are.