Fine Arts UWE and Arnolfini present Veronica Ryan, a Montserrat-born British sculptor. Veronica Ryan is currently working with Spike Island as the third recipient of the annual Freelands Award.
Veronica Ryan’s work draws on her enquiries into ancestral history as well as experiences of place, home, memory and loss. Her work is characterised by an interest in containment and the container, probing the visual, psychological and poetic associations around what is hidden or revealed. In her sculptures and installations, Ryan brings together a wide range of materials and techniques that vary from cast forms in plaster, clay, bronze and aluminium, to more ephemeral found materials such as dried flowers, fruit, feathers and dust. These material combinations create fragile propositions that use the language of mapping, stacking, stitching and tipping to convey the personal and psychological residue held within objects, and that interrogate collective processes such as the exportation of agricultural commodities, migration of peoples and notions of diaspora.
Veronica Ryan (born 1956, Montserrat) is a British artist who currently splits her time between New York and the UK. She studied at Bath Academy of Art, the Slade School of Art and the School for Oriental and African Studies. Ryan’s first solo exhibition was held at Arnolfini, Bristol in 1987. Selected solo exhibitions include: Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 1988; The Wood Street Gallery, Pittsburgh, 1993; Camden Arts Centre, London, 1994; Salena Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2003; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, 2012; The Art House, Wakefield, 2017; and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 2019. Ryan’s work has featured in many group exhibitions including From Two Worlds, Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1986; the British Art Show, Hayward Gallery, London in 1990; Virginia Woolf: Exhibition Inspired By Her Writings, Tate St Ives, 2018; The Place is Here, Nottingham Contemporary, 2017; and Arts Council Collection touring Making It: Sculpture in Britain 1977 – 1986, 2015. Ryan completed a residency at Tate St Ives from 1998 to 2000, where she worked in the former studio of Barbara Hepworth. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery, Arts Council Collection, Contemporary Art Society, the Henry Moore Institute and The Hepworth Wakefield amongst others.