Veronica Ryan

Curated by Tamara H. Schenkenberg and Molly Moog

THERE IS LITTLE that is unruly in Veronica Ryan’s sculptural forms and arrangements. But the methods the Montserrat-born British artist uses to execute them, from hand-sewing to bronze casting, are endlessly surprising. Her materials, such as mango seeds, vintage 35-mm slides, tea bags, straight pins, and broad beans, speak to the autobiographical, and are prodded into unexpected abstract configurations examining adornment, containment, and wholeness. Within this raw concrete space—Tadao Ando’s monument to Minimalist aesthetics—Ryan’s decades-long impulse toward diachronic unity is on full view. Her plangent survey at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, “Unruly Objects,” features 124 drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations—made between 1983 and 2024—organized around seven distinct themes. 

The thirteen early works punctuating the first gallery are gathered under “Life Cycles and Relationships.” Serving as an introduction to Ryan’s personal history as a child of migrants who moved to the United Kingdom from the West Indies—a group called the Windrush generation, named for the ship they arrived in the UK on between the years 1948 and 1971—as well as her interest in the transformational properties of plant life, these pieces represent the compulsory attachments to materials and symbols that will become the bedrock for all of Ryan’s future output. Sans, 1983, is a small graphite drawing depicting a fantastical taxonomy of five organic shapes that evoke germinating, membrane-bound cells and budding vegetation. Signs and Symbols, 2002, is a photograph mounted onto card stock that features a pink, seedlike form floating above the artist’s family (Ryan has dedicated “Unruly Objects” to her mother, who taught her various kinds of handiwork as a child, such as sewing and knitting). The images of kin that surface in the artist’s early collages also anticipate the inclusion of items created by Ryan’s mother in a number of works, like a few of the pincushions that appear in the soft sculpture Trickstify, 2022, which resembles a loose, pillowy grid. Such a gesture also makes manifest the economic ingenuity and domestic know-how Ryan learned from her mother. 

Closed Curtain, 2018–24, was produced specifically for the glass wall that frames the Pulitzer’s reflecting-pool gallery. Here, sixty mesh firewood bags, sewn together to create a gridded two-story scrim, are suspended floor-to-ceiling between a pair of mullions supporting the glass panes that look onto Ando’s water court. The overlaid bags’ simple warp-and-weft construction produces moiré-style shadows that help activate the austere space, formally aligning the piece with Ando’s restrained architecture. Nearby, St Louis Limestone, 2024, plays with the Zen principles that characterize Ando’s design. The work is made up of twenty-four cast-bronze stones, based on six that were culled from the bottom of the reflecting pool. The faux rocks are clustered at the edge of the basin, like an offering.

St Louis Limestone is organized in the same manner as Shack Shack, 2018, a gathering of elongated seedpods bound with fishing line into a single circumscribed object. It is one of many small sculptures that integrate handcrafted elements with organic and found items, emphasizing Ryan’s interest in making the fragmented whole. The acts of bundling, tying, and wrapping have affinities with Ryan’s Afro-Caribbean heritage and the votive practices that were observed in her childhood home. Syncretic and animistic belief systems that assign commonplace objects transformative and protective properties also drive Ryan’s interest in assembling so-called castoffs into ordered, unified totalities. The Thread That Binds, 2024, pairs clean white mango stones with bits of plaster that have been painstakingly banded together with string, while Orange Peel Tea Talking, 2023, is a compact labyrinth of cast fruit rinds generously and obsessively girdled by a nest-like arrangement of cable wire. (Both works are presented alongside seventeen other modestly scaled objects on steel shelves. Visible through this menagerie is Ellsworth Kelly’s 2000 painting Blue Black, from the Pulitzer’s permanent collection. The juxtaposition highlights the formal aspects of Ryan’s art—elements that receive just as much consideration as its narrative and metaphysical qualities.)

The pieces in the “Mourning and Healing” part of the show memorialize the eruption that buried Plymouth, the capital city of Montserrat, under tons of volcanic debris in 1995. A dented aluminum clip lamp in this section, Petrified, mid-2000s, has been filled with Hydrocal, making the object lifeless, lightless—a funereal work. Adjacent to this sculpture is a black-and-white photographic collage with a print, repeated eight times, that depicts five kids in a domestic setting. One of the pictures appears untouched, while in another, the faces of two children have been obscured by white acrylic paint. The subjects within the other six prints, however, are entirely scumbled over. This piece, Psychosis and the Obeah Man, 2002, unambiguously conveys loss—the spiritual figure referred to in the title is a practitioner of the Caribbean Obeah religion, someone who is both healer and executioner. 

The differences between mourning and healing in Ryan’s work are at times indistinguishable, much in the way the natural and synthetic elements of her art frequently bleed into one another. Take Plastered House, mid-2000s, a doll-scale home covered in beige bandages featuring tiny windows outfitted with 35-mm slides. The structure is not illuminated from within, so we cannot see the imagery in the film. The bandages signify care, an attempt to heal. But in this situation, they are useless—there are no signs of life here. Nothing can be saved.

In the exhibition’s final gallery, titled “Excess and Abundance,” we encounter an absurdly large representation of a spiny tropical fruit, one that is avidly consumed by England’s Caribbean populations—the 542-pound bronze Soursop, 2021. Other works in this space feature a range of found and cast botanical forms familiar within Ryan’s visual lexicon. Scaffold, 2021–22, is a stacked arrangement of metal locker shelves zip-tied together. It presents empty plastic coffee pods, beans shaped from Sculpey, and other items—wrapped in the kind of netting used for grocery store produce—that seem to quietly reflect on colonialist trade histories and environmental degradation. While Scaffold offers a colorful and eclectic mix of textures and materials, it carries a vaguely sinister anthropological air—as though it were a makeshift display case from some dystopian museum of tomorrow, tracing the things that led to the end of our civilization, an example of “excess and abundance” that brought on utter ruin.