WORK OF THE WEEK: VERONICA RYAN WINNER OF TURNER PRIZE 2022

Finally! After several years of banal, pretentious, over explained offerings, we have a Turner Prize winner who really deserves our celebration. Hooray! for Veronica Ryan, with her beautiful, soft, squidgy meditative and truly poetic sculptures- soft and stretchy, plumped up like pillows, arranged like shells or pebbles on a shelf, or hanging in net bags that stretch and bulge, like fresh produce from the veg market. They evoke found things, bits and pieces washed up on a beach or thrown away in a skip – but are artfully cast. Many of her sculptures are based on the flora of Montserrat, the Caribbean island where she was born in 1956: soursop skins and cocoa pods, glazed with the island’s volcanic ash. These vegetable forms suggest history, culture, life, AND place; from the fruit itself- unpeeling to reveal both cherished and painful memories. Her winning works included the giant Caribbean fruit sculptures that were unveiled in Hackney, in east London in October 2021 in tribute to the Windrush generation who moved from the Caribbean to the UK after 1948. It was the first permanent public artwork to commemorate the Windrush story.

Fruits, seeds, plants and vegetables are recurring motifs in Ryan’s sculpture – they function metaphorically for the artist’s own sense of dislocation and in a wider context, they refer to a history of trading across the globe amd the legacy of empire and exploitation.

Born in 1956 in Montserrat, she moved to the UK when she was a small child. Her interest in art developed during her school years. In particular, she remembers making a Christmas tree in infant school and being inspired by the creative use of materials in a minimalistic way. She also cites her mother's patchwork as an inspiration for her art.

Ryan was keen to break out of the mould of male-centric British modernism as it was taught in the seventies and eighties by drawing on a wider range of female sculptors and artists of colour. Among her earliest influences was the German-born American sculptor Eva Hesse, whose work she saw first-hand in 1979, at an exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. Around the same time, Ryan discovered the work of Louise Bourgeois. Another formative influence was British sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

Ryan completed her arts studies, which included Slade and School of Oriental and African Studies , at the beginning of the 1980s, a time marked by the rise of the British Black Art Movement. She took part in the ICA’s seminal exhibition The Thin Black Line (London, 1985) and From Two Worlds ( London and Edinburgh, 1986) and this connected her with a broader anti-racist movement although later she felt the need to stress that her work should not be pinned exclusively to race: ‘All along I have had various people be very critical of me because I did not fit into their politicized agenda,’ she said.

At 66 she is the oldest winner in the Turner prize's 38-year history. When her name was announced she shouted out ‘POWER! VISIBILITY!" You bet! For more than twenty years she has been in the shadows- ‘no one was paying attention to my work’ she said. Not a chance of that now. Many congratulations to Veronica Ryan!