Kathleen Ryan:

Sculpting Time

The American sculptor Kathleen Ryan invites us to reflect on time, its perception, its representation, its memory. Overturning the distinctions between “high” art and “low,” Ryan’s practice highlights the importance of the handmade, of the intimate relation between the artist, the materials chosen for each work, and the layers of meaning they carry. Sculpture gives meaning to matter and Ryan inscribes herself in a long history of sculpture, from classical marbles to the “finish fetish” Minimalism of the US West Coast. Playing with form, line, scale, weight, and equilibrium, she pays great attention to detail. Carefully crafted, her works are full of contradictions: heavy/light, natural/artificial, constructed/readymade, seductive/repulsive. Humor dialogues with collapsology; some works are willingly imperfect while others, including the most recent ones, are flawless in surface. Composition and luminosity—notions traditionally associated more with painting than with sculpture—are important for this artist.

Ryan has long been interested in the figure of the bacchante, a recurring character in Western painting and sculpture: a priestess of Bacchus, the Roman god of agriculture, wine, and fertility, equivalent to the Greek Dionysus. Her first sculpture by that name, Bacchante (2015), was inspired by Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Bacchante with an Ape (1627), which she saw at the Getty museum in Los Angeles. In that painting a bacchante leans toward the viewer, smiling and squeezing a bunch of grapes. Her position and seminudity suggest drunkenness. The process of transforming grapes into wine was seen as symbolizing rebirth and regeneration, and Ryan’s Bacchante seems to have metamorphosed into a bunch of grapes—which, though, look like balloons and are made of concrete, giving them a heavy, minimal, monochrome aspect. A utilitarian material, but with a lush aspect. Yet though the work seems on the verge of collapse, it defies gravity and evokes a cornucopia of both abundance and decadence, not to mention eroticism.

Other works refer to fallen civilizations. In The Rise and Fall (2014), four handmade glazed ceramic columns conjure up antique temples, be they Greek or Roman. An homage to ancient societies that rose to power and sophistication before falling apart, this work is a metaphor for the decline of civilizations and shows how contemporary art can serve as a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death. So it is also with Embrace (2018), a granite pillar evoking a tombstone and covered in ivy made of bronze and semiprecious stone. Ryan’s work can here be compared to the vanitas, a symbolic tradition that developed in the seventeenth century, particularly in Dutch painting, to show the transience of life and the futility of pleasure.

Ryan’s work has also been associated with still-life evocations of the brevity of life, decay, and finally death. Wisp (Carrie Furnace) (2017) reminds me of the city of Pompeii, buried in ash in ad 79 during an eruption of the volcano Vesuvius. Ryan’s cast-iron palm leaf suggests a vestige of the old city, frozen for eternity—a petrified memory. Ryan honors the passing of time, even if by definition sculpture stops time in its tracks and freezes movement in matter. The eighteenth-century French chemist Antoine Lavoisier famously said that “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” Nothing completely vanishes: leaves rot, evolve into bacteria, then compost. They transition from one state to another, not destroyed but transformed. Before being leaves, they existed in another arrangement. Their life cycle is about change and evolution. Matter, like ideas, is in a perpetual state of flux, but sculpture captures its temporal imprint, seizing the ephemeral moment and perpetuating it into infinity.

Bad Fruit—a series of larger-than-life decaying fruit, begun in 2018—is Ryan’s best-known and most spectacular body of work, a reflection on the idea of ornament. It started for her with an interest in beaded fruit, a popular postwar craft hobby in the United States, retrospectively considered kitsch. Ryan—who grew up in California, rich in the production of fresh fruit—makes use of this crafting technique: starting with a shape carved out of polystyrene, she attaches manufactured plastic or glass beads to the “fresh” parts of the sculpture and semiprecious stones to the “rotten” ones. “Life” is made up of artificial materials, “death” of natural ones. Yet these sculptures are less about death than about the cycle of life after it. Their surfaces are like a landscape, a topography. The series manifests the artist’s interest in ecology, climate change, and the ravages of monoculture: it can be seen as a critique of the extractivist culture of the West, a meditation on the mass production of fruit and vegetables, which in Ryan’s hands look too good to be real, colorful and juicy but tasteless.

Among the many fruits represented in the series—cherries, melons, grapes, peaches, strawberries, pears, oranges, grapefruit, clementines, and more—the first Ryan chose, and the one she has created most often, is the lemon. A single lemon sculpture is covered in thousands of semiprecious gemstones and can take months to make; it is a work of patience. The artist is interested in the polysemic qualities of the fruit: a lemon can be used in both food and drink; it is a dud car, but also a symbol of optimism (“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”); and so on. In Bad Lemon (Old Money) (2023), the different degrees of mold pictured in the beading create a magnificent dialogue with the vibrant yellow of the lemon’s peel. It is a pure visual pleasure, between attraction and repulsion—toward fascination. As beautiful as they are disturbing, these sculptures intertwine desire and unease. They question our relationship with allure and disgust while challenging the notion of value. Here Ryan highlights the decline of life, but with perfectly executed works of art.

Ryan’s attention to the artificialization of nature can take other forms. The gigantic Daisy Chain (2021), for example, is assembled from found objects—garden hoses for stems, plastic funnels for pistils, cut vinyl for petals. An innocent amusement is reinterpreted for the age of plastic and excess. Ryan’s art lies somewhere between a critique of the twentieth century’s love of progress and a testimony to its consequence, the climate change of the century following. There is irony here, a subtle humor. It can be seen as a reflection on consumerism, in a society dominated by commodities.

The idea of broken civilizations reappears in such works as Untitled (Chandelier) (2015) and Satellite in Repose (2018), both made of glazed ceramic and various metals. This fallen chandelier and satellite could be remnants of an undated past, fossils of consumerism. Ghostly ceramic parrots gathering on them are the last witnesses left. The artist is interested in waste—she looks passionately for vintage or derelict objects, spending hours hunting online. In reusing these everyday relics and vernacular elements in her work, she gives them a second chance, and beauty to things that no longer have any. Ryan’s assemblages are about transfiguration, some sort of memorial. “Inanimate objects, do you have a soul?,” wondered the French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine; Ryan’s sculptures may both represent and include objects taken from reality, but she gives them a soul.

Ryan regularly pays homage to Americana. Bowling, for example: though bowling has been around for centuries in different forms and in different cultures, it is considered one of America’s most democratic pastimes. The artist plays with the symbol and its scale using real bowling balls. In Caprice (2016), one appears as a delicate pearl inside a large shell; in Pearls (2017), several become a set of pearls in a disproportionate necklace. Other works turn bowling balls into earrings or bracelets. Ryan also plays with symbols of the American dream such as the Airstream trailer. For the Bad Melon series (2020– ) she bought an old one and sliced it up to make pieces of melon rind, while the flesh of the fruit is made of semiprecious stones. The artist doesn’t hide the original function of the objects she uses: in Bad Melon (Wedge) (2020), for instance, part of the rear chassis is clearly recognizable, with its lights and brand lettering. In Generator II (2022), a Volkswagen hood and trunk become an oyster shell sheltering a sparkling spiderweb of quartz crystal. Nature and manufacture, organic and mechanical, living and nonliving, beautifully merge.

In the Bad Fruit series, the permanence and preciousness of the stones contrast with the swift and repulsive process of decomposition. Ryan’s interest in stones is a red thread running through her practice. Precious stones are considered dead, but are not; they are minerals, living elements. They grow, incredibly slowly by human standards, in the secret depths of the earth. Gemstones, especially crystals, are thought to have specific energies and powers, but the artist chooses them first for their materiality, color, and effect. She started this journey with a pair of sculptural seedpods: Miranda (2017) has seeds of jade, Diana (2017) of rose quartz, all bursting from their cast iron shells. Since then Ryan has employed many other semiprecious stones: aquamarine, jasper, turquoise, obsidian, agate, pink opal, amber, tourmaline, amethyst, onyx, lapis lazuli, and more—a powerfully suggestive list. These fragments of the universe would be first-rate items in a cabinet of curiosities.

Ryan sometimes hints at the human figure, but she has never represented it directly. Her most beautiful and metaphorical representation of the human—if tending toward the cyborg—might be Heart (2022), a mysterious, gleaming red half-fruit whose beating heart is a motor engine. Apart from this dichotomy of life and machine, a sense of mortality—about all living beings—runs throughout her work. A tribute to the past, an anchoring in the present, and a projection into the future are signs of her hybrid practice. In an age marked by the acceleration of time, the instantization of information, and a deluge of images, Ryan’s work is a tribute to gesture and know-how, as well as to the long process of sculpture. But it is, above all, about sculpting time.