Veronica Ryan’s life looks hectic at the moment. Not only because the sculptor has just landed in New York after her historic Turner Prize win, with a tiny window of time to catch up with her family before she’ll have to prioritise preparation for her next shows. It’s her room. The West Village home she is speaking to me from is overwhelmingly packed with oddities: ripening fruits and metallic columns that “have got as tall as they could get before they start falling over”.
“When I go and stay in various places, within a day, it looks a bit like this,” she says, laughing. “My father used to wonder why my room was always full of useless paraphernalia. I probably didn’t look very normal.”
The space is a glimpse into the 66-year-old’s curious mind. The artist – who was born in Montserrat and grew up in London – is renowned for taking seemingly disparate objects, textures and ideas and poetically joining the dots between them. Over her impressive career, which began in the early ’80s, she’s exhibited her work across Europe and America, from the Whitney Biennial to the ICA, but this year is special. “I haven’t absorbed the Turner Prize [news] properly yet,” she says of winning one of art’s most prestigious accolades. “It feels a bit overwhelming.”
The reaction is typical for Ryan. She’s far more at home talking about a nearby pomegranate and its significance to her artistic message than awards. She often speaks in meandering streams of consciousness, fascinated by the minutiae of the natural world. Swiftly, I’m carried along by her sense of wonder, considering how seemingly innocuous objects, markings or superstitions are emblematic of histories, heritage and psychology.
While we chat, the deep-thinking collector rifles through all of the scavenged items that will lay the groundwork for her next pieces. Ryan works at home, where she fills her workspace with the sound of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet For the End of Time” and, more recently, Stormzy, while she uses materials such as fishing line, flowers, bronze and clay to distil big ideas – about motherhood, ancient movement, diasporic experiences or ecology – into playful forms. “I’ve got all kinds of structures in here – these are like mountains,” she says, holding white porcelain figures that remind her of the volcanoes of Montserrat and Martin Luther King Jr’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.
You can draw symbolism from Ryan’s Turner win. Her displayed work used tropical fruits (of course), seeds and skins as a metaphor for her own cultural dislocation. Incidentally, the natural produce of the Caribbean islands built the wealth of port towns including Liverpool. And now Ryan, a Caribbean-born woman, is recognised for her craft in the industrial northern city, her work on display at Tate Liverpool, an institution built on the wealth of a titan from the slave-built sugar industry on those isles, within view of the city’s International Slavery Museum.
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April 10, 2023 at 01:00PM
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“I Don’t Fit Into One Singularity”: Turner Prize Winner Veronica Ryan Is In A League Of Her Own - British Vogue
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