"Veronica Ryan with María Elena Ortiz"

Born in Montserrat and raised in England, Veronica Ryan OBE, RA creates meticulously handcrafted work using a wide range of materials, including bronze, plaster, marble, textile, and found objects. A Turner Prize recipient, Ryan has examined the psychological implications of history, trauma, and recovery in relation to the broader culture through her sculptures and installations across her four-decade long practice. On the occasion of her exhibition Unruly Objects at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Ryan joined curator María Elena Ortiz for a conversation about the evolution of her practice on the New Social Environment (Episode #1,200).

María Elena Ortiz (Rail): I always think it’s interesting to learn how we get here. How did you become an artist?

Veronica Ryan: I was lucky to be always an artist, thinking about early education and facilities at school, and having a myriad of materials around. I remember when I was in school, a teacher showed us how to make a Christmas tree with empty thread spools and bits of fern twigs. That made a strong impression, and for me it’s connected to my mother, who sewed and made all our clothes and knitted and so on. I liked playing with my mother’s sewing implements and going through her boxes.

She taught me how to sew quite early on. I think that was my first experience, really, of how to combine different materials. We didn’t have many toys, but children can be so curious. I just played around with things and lost needles and so on. When I lost a needle, my mother had a magnet, and I had to find it. I spent ages having to find needles with this magnet. So I think there are different kinds of early experiences which, in retrospect, were formative in how I was able to think in three dimensions.

Rail: I love that you mentioned curiosity. Do you think that curiosity is something that has continued throughout your practice, in terms of themes or materials?

Ryan: Yes, I think having fabrics, pins, and pincushions early on opened up curiosities for other materials. And so jumping ahead, when I didn’t have materials or didn’t have much money, I was really interested in things around me. One of these things was the apple packing crates you see in shops. I always found those structures interesting. Egg boxes, too. But I think my curiosity started quite early on, noticing things that were discarded.

Rail: You’re touching upon notions of resourcefulness, which I think that a lot of artists—especially Caribbean artists—relate to. To give you an example, Wifredo Lam, when he started painting Cuba, he would paint with just paper. The Jungle (La Jungla) (1942–43) is actually a work on paper, because that’s what he was able to get when he was in the Caribbean painting in the forties. I’m intrigued by this connection between curiosity and resourcefulness that I see in your work as well.

Ryan: Not having many resources forced me to use things around me. If one has that desire to make things and to explore one’s environment and materials, whatever is around becomes part of that vocabulary. For example, a work I made in 2020 that is in the exhibition, Infection VII (Punnet I), includes a dyed thread doily. When I was quite young my mother and my aunt would crochet these doily mats that were often used on the cabinet in the front room, which was a special room. You couldn’t really go in there and touch things. My mother would collect little birds and glass jugs and so on, and plastic flowers—ornaments. And in a sense, that’s what I’ve done with the objects in this work.

Having early experiences with the matriarchs of the family making these objects, I think I just internalized different ways of constructing things, which is partly why I have ended up using so many different kinds of materials.

Rail: I grew up in Puerto Rico, and my grandmother also taught us how to crotchet, so it’s also taking me to childhood memories. Now, you were born in Montserrat, but you grew up in England, and you developed your career in England. What type of infrastructures helped you and supported your career as a young artist?

Ryan: At school I was lucky to have young teachers who had just left teacher-training college and had a lot of energy. One really important teacher was my English teacher, but also the pottery teacher, the art teacher, and a sociology teacher—those were the people who showed quite a lot of interest in me. I think it was really important having these teachers who fostered my curiosity at the time. And I used to write poetry. The English teacher was fascinated by the fact that I wrote poetry, and he often encouraged me to show him what I had written. So early on, there were these other ways of constructing or having access to imaginary worlds, because these teachers were so supportive and encouraged me to keep going. I think I was just lucky, really, to be at this particular school at that particular time.

Rail: You received a BA from the Bath Academy of Art. What was that like?

Ryan: The art school system at the time in Britain was set up in a traditional way. You did a foundation course, and then during the foundation course, which was a year, you moved around in different subjects—painting, sculpture, pottery, graphics—and they looked at where your strengths were. In the last term you were encouraged to pursue those which were considered your strengths. I did a fine art degree. So as well as making sculpture, I was doing some ceramics, I was doing printmaking. Once I left college, I didn’t have access to the printing materials, but what I realized over time was that my drawings had a lot to do with the process of printmaking that I had learned in school.

I learned how to carve wood and how to work on the lathe. I made some bowls. Learning to carve wood was exciting, because later on, when I was invited to do a project in St. Ives, in Barbara Hepworth’s studio, there were some blocks of Carrara marble. And I was offered some of this marble to work on. The fact that I had learned to carve wood took some of the terror out of thinking, “Oh my goodness, I’m going to have access to carving in Barbara Hepworth’s Carrara marble!” [Laughter] Having a sense of material possibility was important because it also meant that I could think in all these different paradigms—different material possibilities.

Part of the teaching at Bath though was that there wasn’t a lot of encouragement in terms of what was then deemed “craft.” The boundaries have broken down—thank goodness—but I didn’t at that point think that sewing or knitting and crochet could be part of the art conversation, even though we had looked at the Bauhaus and saw some of the most beautiful work made in craft and weaving.

Rail: How did you go from Bath to Slade? What factors shaped that decision?

Ryan: Towards the end of the third year at Bath, I knew I wanted to continue to be an artist, but I hadn’t really thought about how I was going to do that. We had visitors from London, and one of the visiting tutors suggested I apply to do a postgrad at Slade, but there was just a week left until the closing date for applications. So the first and only time I took photographs and printed in the dark room was to get a whole folio together of work I was making as a student. I got the application in within the last few days, and then I got an interview. So sometimes things just happen or seem to occur by happenstance. I hadn’t planned to apply, but if I hadn’t, I would have been very disappointed.

It’s interesting: when I was at the Slade, the tutors didn’t encourage us to think about working professionally—how you make contacts afterwards. But when I was teaching at Goldsmiths a number of years later, some of the students were already thinking in quite a professional way about their practice. Some students were already showing. The origins of Frieze, for example, were some of the students at Goldsmiths at the time. They were really engaged in how you have this career. But for my generation, it wasn’t part of the way one was encouraged. There was still this idea that you worked in your studio, and that somehow people might discover you. It was a romanticized notion really about exposure, because being proactive is essential to moving forward in any way.

Rail: After Slade, where did you go?

Ryan: I mean, luckily, when I left the Slade one of my fellow students had an Acme house. Acme is an organization in London. At the time, condemned buildings were available for artists—mostly in the East End of London—to buy and repair. Later many of those properties were demolished, a bit like Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Of course, if you haven’t got somewhere to live, it’s very difficult to think about how one is going to continue practicing as an artist.

Residences have always been very important as a way to have support. At the time, the Whitechapel Gallery was involved in having an open-call exhibition. Once a year there was an open call so artists in the East End could submit works, and the works were selected—or not—for the open. So there were structures that helped to enable visibility. Some of the workshops and residences provided a community; in fact, because some of the residences were connected with the local schools, the program introduced children to these Whitechapel Gallery artists who would go into schools and work with different materials that were connected with their own practice. It was a really important form of early intervention with kids at different ages. One of the residences I did was working with boys with learning and behavioral problems, and I was working with another artist at the time as well. So I was learning different ways to encourage youngsters to work, seeing how they needed to develop a way of thinking three-dimensionally—or painting and so on—and introducing different materials into the school.

Ryan: I made several pillows early on in the eighties. And one of the things that was interesting—talking about notions of craft—was I made an armature in the studio. Then I was using wool blankets. It’s interesting for me to think about reusing materials. At the time, people had started using duvets more, so in the secondhand shops you would often see a lot of wool blankets. So for one of the early pillows I made, I cut up large squares over the armature. And actually I quite liked the covered armature in the wool blankets, because it was heavier than just using plaster bandage. Some of the pillows were based on my body circumference; that was quite an important way that I worked. The larger of my earlier works were made in relation to the circumference of my body. But at that early point, I didn’t feel I had permission to just leave the dipped plaster in the wool blankets, which had quite an interesting texture—though some of that recurred in later work. I could see some of that earlier anxiety found its way into some of the later work.

Rail: Why did you start working with pillows? When I think about pillows, I think about comfort and rest—downtime.

Ryan: Well, it goes back to my mother. My mother used to talk about being a girl in Montserrat, and how the sugar and flour came in these thick cotton sacks. Her aunt and other local people would wash the sacks and make pillowcases out of them. And then my mother would talk about embroidery, and how they would embroider these sacks. So going back to how I thought about using discarded materials: there we are. That’s an early example of my mother talking about sacks, which were very good cotton that came to the island and were repurposed.

That’s how the pillowcases started, and then I began to think about dreams and how we dream, and that we’re on the pillow when we dream. When you’re a kid, you might have this idea that dreams are coming out of the pillow in some way. So there was something to do with that experience of dream states and nightmares. That’s how the pillowcases started. Later on, I started using hair bands. At another point, I crunched up the pillowcases and made a stack of sculptures.

Process is also important, thinking about materiality and so on. During the process of making some of the pillows, I started to be interested in them all scrunched up. So I might start off with an idea: for example, some of the pillows were medical pillows, and I’m thinking about, “Oh, I have this idea about medical pillows and injuries and so on.” But then seeing, at another point, “Oh, I also found that interesting.” Often one idea in the material context leads on to another possibility. Even though the idea starts off with a concrete intention, the intention might take on a different tangent because of the suggestion of a different modality in the work.

Rail: That’s interesting. You mentioned materiality and process, and your choice of materials make the work feel very organic. There’s a degree of flexibility in even how you describe your work. Would you say that’s an accurate assertion? How does that organic quality fit into your work?

Ryan: Yes, I think about the organic nature of some of the objects, as well as the organic way one develops an artwork. I see a sort of polarity between the organic way the ideas develop, and the concrete actuality. So, for instance, the work Sweet Dreams are Made of These (2021) includes cocoa pods.

Rail: That’s really interesting. It gets me thinking about materials that you use which are not traditional art materials. Can you talk about, for example, using pillows and pillowcases in your work?

I love that cocoas don’t grow off a stem. They grow off the trunks of trees. When I went to Nigeria, after leaving the Slade, I tried bringing back cocoa pods, because I’d never seen an actual cocoa pod, or hadn’t remembered them. Of course, at customs, they go through everything to make sure people aren’t trying to go off with antiquities and so on. So when they opened my suitcase, there were all these rotten cocoa pods, because all the seeds had started to seep through the skin. And so seepage became something I thought about.

I really appreciate that there are these different moments where there’s a connection with an incident, but I also think about the nature of how we have chocolate, through child labor in different parts of the globe, and the amount of pesticides that are needed to have lots of cocoa pods for the demand for chocolate. The work sort of moves in and out of these connected thoughts. It’s very interconnected with different moments: our desire, the Western desire for sweets, because, of course, it also needs a lot of sugar.

So, whilst there is this interest in the actual structure of things, the thinking moves into the wider way that products become available. One of the other things is that cocoa absorbs cadmium from the soil. There are graphs that show which chocolate is absorbing less of these chemicals, and which regions use less chemicals in the soil for overproduction. So there’s this contradiction between something that is lovely to taste and inherently poisonous. I have an interest in pathology and dysfunction and power structures, but it’s part of my world view, which becomes part of the conversation in the work.

I’ve made another work that incorporates marshmallows. I’m interested in the fact that the marshmallow plant is very curative and has a lot of medicinal properties, but this marshmallow sweet is the exact antithesis of the actual curative modality in the herb. I’m interested in these contradictions, and also that traditionally, sugar would have been used in the same way we use salt. It wouldn’t have been a huge part of the diet. Nowadays, most foods, if you look at the label, there’s sugar in everything, and not one kind of sugar, there are at least three different kinds of sugars. So it’s about these different kinds of structures and how we are subject to forces outside of our control in lots of incidences.

Rail: Your work has also referenced christophines, which are like melons. I’m thinking of Momento Mori I from 2022.

Ryan: Yes, my parents really like christophine with saltfish. It’s kind of a melon, but it has more of a plant taste. At the unveiling of my sculptures in Hackney for the Windrush Commission, one of the elders brought me a christophine. He was born in Montserrat, and he grows ackees in his allotment; it was so special that he came to the opening and gave me this christophine, so I cast it. It was such a special moment, and he would have known my parents weren’t there. My mother couldn’t get there at the time, she was quite ill, and my father had died. I really appreciate an older community being able to connect with the sculptures because they grew up with these items—breadfruit, soursop, custard apple—as part of their diet.

Rail: When you mentioned sugar, I also thought about the sugar industry in the Caribbean. There were sugar plantations in Cuba and Puerto Rico and other parts of the region that were a driving force for enslaved labor. But also they made a lot of impact on the environment in places like South Florida. And when you mentioned the ackee—you know, I lived for almost ten years in Miami, and there are a lot of ackee trees that were brought, rumor has it, by Jamaicans into the South Florida landscape. You kind of strip away the flavor and bring us back to the form, and the cultural ramifications, but there is also something playful to these sculptures.

Ryan: Well, the playful side was important in terms of children being able to interact with the sculptures. Every time I’ve been there, I see children playing on them. I saw a man stand up and jump to see if he could rock the soursop. It does have a little movement in it, in terms of the tension—it needs to give a little in terms of its installation in the ground. But the idea that an adult wanted to see, “Oh, how far could I move it around?” That’s playful, but they’re not going anywhere. [Laughter] I’ve had people ask to borrow them, and you have to explain, “No, they’re actually cemented in the ground.” You can’t just borrow it and hope that it can just be moved to another location.

So those are some of the aspects of humor and playfulness, these different paradigms; and there is a connection with my mother, who has since died. Actually, the work at the Pulitzer is an homage to my mother, and matriarchs, and how information is passed down through the female line.

Rail: I find it fascinating how you learned some of the things that still inspire your practice—like the crocheting and the knitting—from your mother. It sounds like without knowing about this tension between craft and the so-called “fine arts,” you just created your own visual language to kind of move through the system: taking some of its structure, but then also creating space for you to present and express your own voice. I find that quite fascinating.

Ryan: As a child, I wouldn’t have understood why my mother kept the orange peels after we had oranges, and I was fascinated when I later went to Nigeria and saw how women peeled oranges in a complete circle. There are these kinds of connections that one finds. As a child, you’re not really thinking, “Oh my goodness, my mother’s passing on all this knowledge and information.” We didn’t have tea and coffee growing up. My mother would grow all our mint and different herbs for teas.

Once my grandmother sent a parcel from Montserrat, and it had a lot of different herbs in it, and it was opened at customs because I think she also put in arrowroot. Now in Britain—I think just generally—arrowroot is used to thicken sauces. It also has a medicinal purpose, but they would have wondered what this powder was. So by the time it got to our house in Watford, I remember distinctly wondering, “Oh, my goodness, what did Granny send?” And my mother saying, “Oh, it was arrowroot.” The customs perhaps looked in because they were concerned it was something else. These little stories show how one learns information and internalizes particular influences, and that became part of my subject matter of my work.

In some of the work at the Pulitzer—the hanging pieces—I have rock crystals and other stones, which are to do with grief and honoring my mother and my father, who died quite a long time ago, as well as honoring my siblings. I have three siblings who died in quite tragic ways. So the way that some of these shrine-like presentations work are really important in terms of mourning, honoring, and celebration.

I’ve been feeling really excited about the exhibition, but also quite sad. It’s a survey of work over a forty-year period, but there’s a lot of absence. I’ve been quite welled up, because the work takes me back to different moments, different situations at particular times in which it was made. There is a kind of biography in the work. There’s a relation to the environmental situation.

Rail: I know you took some inspiration from the Lega culture in Central Africa. Can you talk a little about that?

Ryan: Yes. So for one of my studies, I was looking at Lega culture in the eastern Republic of the Congo: a traditional society where gourds, perfume bottles, and light bulbs could be used in a traditional context, but they could all take on the same semantic meaning. I’ve always been interested in the fact that one could have these different configurations—different accumulation of objects—but some of them could have a similar meaning, or they could aggregate to establish different kinds of meanings together. I really appreciate how you could substitute one material for another—one idea for another—both in its concept and its evocation. I think that really talks about the way that the work comes together with all these different moments. Because I work on multiple things, sometimes the work would go back to a moment in the past and see a connection with a current moment.

Clearly, some work has disappeared. There was a fire in London that destroyed a lot of my work. But disappearance through fire has other resonances. I’m thinking about Montserrat, for example, and the volcano that destroyed Plymouth, where I was born. I think it’s an honor to have been born in the same place as my parents, and that we have a work inextricably bound to a place which no longer exists.

I then start thinking about about mortality and grief, connecting with one’s ancestors and seeing what the connections are in Montserrat to West Africa, for instance, and seeing how my mother would have learned sewing through her aunt and her grandparents, which we see evidence of through similar kinds of stylistic patterns in other parts of Africa.

So there are these threads. Threads are very relevant. Threads are one of the conceptual paradigms in the work, both literally and in terms of how one picks or tries to make connections between a lot of fractures, and so on. The work embodies all these different modalities, all these various ways of seeing—sometimes the fractures don’t come together, sometimes there won’t be a connection.

Rail: It’s amazing to see how the work has been informed very deeply by different moments in your life. It goes back to something you said earlier about your interest in exploring polarities. Even when we’re looking at the cocoa work, it’s tied to a lot of histories of tension; but for people like me who love chocolate, it’s also a place where I can connect with other people who are very different from me. There’s always that duality. Somehow, you embody it all: the pain and joy and tension at the same time.

Ryan: I made some work about the city of Plymouth. There’s a sign that says “exclusion zone.” That is quite evocative to me, because it gets me thinking about different kinds of exclusions: historical exclusions, current exclusions, nuanced exclusions, and psychological exclusions, which could be the way one is affected by nuanced behavior. I am really interested in the psychological way that history has determined how we function in society.

Thinking about the volcano reminds me of the people who have been able to get into the caves and see markings which relate to other parts of Africa, other parts of the globe. I think there’s similar kinds of markings in Europe. That gets me thinking about movement across the globe and how there might be similar historical symbols, which speaks to a kind of interconnected prehistory. I am really interested in these meeting points where things don’t meet. The work really is an extended conversation around a lot of these different interconnected or disconnected parts.