As well as being a fine physician, Dr Ruth is a skilled artist, whose sculptures and drawings attest to her love of life and eye for beauty and detail.
The work on this page are of sculptures she has created.
Dr Cilento is available to talk to groups about her work and many interests.
Please contact Dr Cilento directly.
The biggest problem in interviewing Dr Ruth Cilento, of Bracken Ridge, is keeping to the subject you go there to discuss. Ruth has had a multi-faceted, fascinating life and in conversation one thing just leads to another.
On this occasion the official subject was her entries in the Society of Sculptors Christmas gift exhibition at Paddington this week. When we arrive a number of small sculptures are laid out on the dining table for us to photograph. They are about one of her abiding concerns - "mothering and fathering and nurturing".
Formed from clay are parent-child pairs including a Nepalese mother with her baby snuggled against her in a cloth carrier, and a child riding on his father's shoulders. "They say to me that nurturing matters. It gives a child identity and self-esteem. They are all touching and that's where hands come in" says Ruth as she leads us to a studio out the back to have a look at her "hand work" for the next exhibition.
On the way, a large sculpture of a woman holding a baby and looking skywards sits in a raised garden. "I did that in 1956 when I lost a baby. I actually got over the depression doing it," she says.
The large studio, which doubles as a library, is full not only of casts of hands in progress but bronze and clay busts. Her three children were all captured in clay in their teens and there is a bronze bust of sister Diane when she was a wild child of 17, as well as busts of Africans who inspired Ruth on a trip there. "I took up sculpting when I was 7 using clay from my grandmother's drain in Collaroy," she says. "I really loved doing it, particularly since my sisters used to say :'Make something for me' - that means you are something special. "My older sister is an artists so it was something I could do."
References to her illustrious family naturally pepper the conversation. From her father Sir Raphael, Ruth says the inherited a deep interest in disadvantaged people. "He was always interested in people who were displaced and down trodden," she says.
She also notes the symmetry of her mother's first book in 1934, which was Square Meals For The Family, and her own of 1997 called the Anti-Cancer Cookbook.
This brings us to her medical career, which includes 22 years as a GP at Bald Hills, 15 years in outpatients psychiatry and more recently holistic cancer treatment. There is a fascinating interlude in the mid-70's when Ruth went bush.
She has an angora goat stud and hand-built a complex of mud brick and other natural materials that used alternative energy from the sun, wind and even methane to service it.
The next project is to spend one month in three in a piece of rainforest she has bought in far North Queensland where she will sculpt and study plants. The interview has bounced from sculpture to human development, bush tucker to doll making. It is time to go but not before I spied a statue of a dragon with a marble eye. "I did that when I was cross with politicians," Ruth says. "It is winking and has a split tongue. It has one hand on its heart and the other on its wallet and vestigial wings because it is a fallen angel. When you burn incense under it, it is full of hot air." A wry explanation for this dragon of a pollie but it shows just how therapeutic sculpting can be.
Sun Powered Energy Complex (SPEC) built by Dr Cilento at Eukey included nine types of building material and seventy-seven display of energy production from sun, wind, methane, charcoal, hot air and other sources.
Notes on inventions are stored in her extensive library.
Farming, Herbs and Angora Breeding and Permaculture that Dr Ruth Cilento has used available in her library.
