Veronica Ryan

Veronica Maudlyn Ryan OBE RA (born 1956 in Plymouth, Montserrat) is a Montserrat-born British sculptor.

[4] From the outset, Ryan was keen to break out of the mould of British modernism as it was then taught by drawing on a wider range of female sculptors and artists of colour.

There, she became especially interested in the re-adaptation of everyday consumables, including food and ephemeral waste materials, into fetishes used in spiritual offerings and shrines.

[5] Ryan completed her studies at the beginning of the 1980s, a time marked by the rise of the British Black Arts Movement.

[5] Ryan's preferred materials range from heavy ones like cement, bronze, lead and painted plaster, to lighter and more ephemeral ones like paper, dust, flowers and feathers.

[7] Her sculptures are abstract and tend towards the biomorphic, appealing to organic forms like pods, shells, husks and seeds.

In an article published to coincide with her exhibition at Camden Arts Centre and Angel Row Gallery, Ryan explains how her small studio in New York is also a representation of the container, and as such a sculptural environment in which daily accumulations, dust heaps, deposits become the preoccupations in the work.

A product of the British Caribbean diaspora, she is particularly attentive to questions of origins, memory, and belonging in relation to place and landscape.

[5] On 1 October 2021, Ryan's three-piece, marble and bronze work Custard Apple (Annonaceae), Breadfruit (Moraceae) and Soursop (Annonaceae), depicting three Caribbean fruits, was unveiled in the London Borough of Hackney as London's first permanent public monument celebrating the Windrush generation,[9] and the first permanent public sculpture by a black female artist in the UK.

[8] In 1985, her work was included in The Thin Black Line, a groundbreaking exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid at the ICA, London.

In June 2017, she had a residency at The Art House, Wakefield, where she re-examined her connection with Barbara Hepworth in relation to themes of ancestral history, domesticity and memory.