Veronica Ryan, Collective Moments, 2018/2023
Tie-dye pillowcase, hair bands
Variable sizes 38x28cm approx.
20 unique works
Standard Price £6,250
Patron Price £5,625
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About the Works
Elemental processes such as tying, binding, staining and stacking are prevalent throughout Veronica Ryan’s work. She deploys these techniques with intense sensitivity as a kind of reckoning or discovery. In these wallbased sculptural works – which sit somewhere between textile, relief, sculpture and painting – pillowcases are tie-dyed and then twisted and bunched with coloured hair bobbles. It creates an object rich with associations to the body, to states of rest, sleep, dream and reverie, as well as the daily rituals and complex cultural signifiers of clothing, care, grooming and hair styling.
As with so many of Ryan’s works, they play with the familiar forms, languages and histories of modernist Western art, whilst at the same time invoking more active, ritualistic objects, drawn from various African and Caribbean cultures. In the early 1980s Ryan spent time in Nigeria and became fascinated with how meaning could be wrested from the raw materials of life. It was here that she first witnessed votive objects being fashioned from everyday materials – hair, eggs, chalk and kola nuts – and became fascinated by the way they were invested, through ritual, with a spiritual power, used for psychic defence, personal care, mystical healing or for honouring ancestors.
Collective Moments, 2023, draws on and extends all of these themes and ideas, occupying an important place in her rich and expansive oeuvre. In the apparent simplicity of its engagement with the humble materials of everyday life, Ryan opens up new systems of meaning. Her works are constellations and expressions of embodied, hand-worked, intuitive and highly-charged material knowledge, what the critic Barry Schwabsky has described as ‘a sort of rumination-by-doing’, or ‘materialised thought process.
About the artist
Veronica Ryan OBE RA was born in 1956 in Plymouth, Montserrat. She moved as an infant with her parents to London before going on to study at St Albans College of Art & Design, Bath Academy of Art and Slade School of Fine Art. She was the recipient of the 2022 Turner Prize. Ryan now divides her time between the USA and UK. Ryan was the artist-in-residence at Camden Art Centre in 1994 and in 1995 exhibited a new group of works at the gallery.
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