Ruby Healey completed the Creative Arts and Design Professional Practicum in 2020 as part of her degree at RMIT University. She was supported by a New Colombo Plan grant.
When Ruby joined the Acicis Creative Arts & Design Professional Practicum she expected to refine her printmaking. Instead, her placement at Grafis Huru Hara, a print studio inside Jakarta’s Gudskul ecosystem, reshaped her thinking on time, collaboration and work. “We pretty much just spent most of the day hanging out, drinking coffee” she recalls. At first, she worried that nothing would get done, yet the loose rhythm Indonesians call nongkrong soon proved powerful. Guided by studio members, she produced two zines, learned a new print technique and, a week later, found herself teaching that same technique to her peers. “By the end of the month, I don’t know how it happened, but I’d had such a big output of work,” she says. The experience also destroyed any fear of sharing skills too early. “You don’t have to be like a master of your craft to teach someone something or to put on a workshop.”
Back in Melbourne Ruby built her career around those lessons. She now manages the creative team at social-enterprise design studio Y-Lab, co-runs Idle Time, a Brunswick East workspace for artists, and freelances across graphic design and illustration. Every project begins with conversation; knowledge moves freely; deadlines follow naturally.
Whenever she visits her partner’s family in Indonesia, she detours to Gudskul, keeping alive the relationships first forged during the practicum. Those ties have already opened unexpected doors. In 2022 she reunited with former mentors in Germany when Ruangrupa, an offshoot of Gudskul, curated Documenta Fifteen. The same alumni chain helped land her first large-scale Australian showing when cyanotype prints, adapted from her Acicis zine, covered the main tent at Melbourne’s Nongkrong Festival.
New work keeps growing from the same roots. Ruby is co-authoring Merantau Stories, a grant-funded book blending recipes, oral histories and design to map Indonesian diaspora life in Melbourne. The collaborative spirit mirrors the practicum that set her path. Asked what she would advise the next cohort, she says: “Go with it, have no expectations or if you have expectations, shed them and just kind of go with the flow and let the experience happen.”
She also urges newcomers to step outside familiar circles, share late-night kopi with local colleagues and accept every invitation. For Ruby, serious work can start with an unhurried chat; that idea, first tested in a Jakarta courtyard, now guides every studio session and festival deadline.
