Kathleen Ryan: Time, Crafted

My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. “Listen,” he said, “life and no escape.”

—Anne Carson

Serpentine, prehnite, ruby in zoisite. Abalone shell, labradorite, calcite, rope. The given names of Kathleen Ryan’s materials are incantations in the mouths of witches. Cherry quartz, rose quartz, smoky quartz. Aventurine, aquamarine, carnelian. These lists exist as a memory game. A maze with always-moving walls. A plentitude. Onyx, horn, jasper, brass flies. Freshwater pearls, mother-of-pearl, rhodochrosite, opal. Amazonite touches dolomite. Fluorite meets malachite meets magnesite. Turquoise seeps through smears of angelite and druzy agate. (Say the word, luxuriate in its r: druzy.) Tigereye, garnet, carnelian. Unakite, aquamarine, green line jasper. Volkswagen hood. Volkswagen trunk. Cast iron. Crystal balls.

That there is such nominative richness among Ryan’s chosen materials should be unsurprising for an artist whose practice is so beholden to—at times dictated by—materials themselves. For while much has been said about that which Ryan depicts—eighty-four parrots perched on a satellite dish; a watermelon with an Airstream crust; a lemon decomposing with the utmost poise—there has been little discussion, to this point, of her methods of assemblage or of the scavenged objects upon which she chooses to bestow a second life. (This is a tale of the animate inanimate.) There can be no argument that Ryan’s is a practice concerned with waste, consumerism, overconsumption, nor that it conflates the supposed binaries of “high” and “low” (class, culture, taste, and so on), nor that it reanimates the art historical tradition of vanitas for a generation that is increasingly distracted from its own mortality. (My generation, my distraction, my mortality.) But more centrally, perhaps more fundamentally, certainly more foundationally, it is a sculptural practice deeply rooted in objects and the stories they contain. It’s not what it looks like, it’s what it is, or was, or continues to be in some new form.

Ryan’s current studio is a grotto, a surgery, a junkyard on poured concrete. It is a modern-day lapidarium on the banks of the Hudson. Beads and semiprecious stones are chromatically divided into buckets, drawers, and clear plastic tubs. The severed hoods of muscle cars are laid to rest against walls. Steel bumpers are piled like bones picked clean. A series of chrome shelving units are heaped with thousands of gems that gradate, and do so oh-so-subtly, from cream to a dusty pink. As an undergraduate at Pitzer College, Ryan studied art and archaeology. Appropriately, her studio has come to resemble an excavation site, one that is chaotic and meticulously structured, oriented around a central workbench on which the artist and her team of beaders assemble vivid swatches of stones. On one tray, a grassy patch of deep emerald beads is offset by a belt of scarlet gems, juicy as strawberries. On another, a corolla in pink quartz encircles a glossy pad of olive green. On another, a procession of loose azure blocks stands to attention, stands in anticipation of attachment. With tools and tacks and nondescript tubes of adhesive occupying the few areas of vacant space, it’s as if Ryan and her team are attempting to put color back together again—and are doing so with no guidance as to its original form. They must simply follow its logic, its temperament, its tone. Follow the color and see where it leads.

Follow feels like the operative word, for Ryan is an artist who continually takes her lead from the objects that she dredges from the wreckage of recent and distant history. Mother of Pearl (2019), a joint monument to fallen civilizations and to fallen industry, owes its totemic form to its past life as part of an industrial furnace. The spidery stems of Bad Cherries (2021) were once (or, in a charming contradiction that lingers throughout Ryan’s work, continue to be) vintage fishing rods. When she begins work on one of her Bad Fruit (2018–) sculptures, her starting point is an item of fresh produce that, having been left to decompose in the studio, slowly accumulates its new colors, its new flies, its second skin. But having carved a larger-than-life approximation of its likeness in foam, she will stop short of transferring those newfound colors onto the exposed neutral surface. Instead she and her team will retrieve the buckets, drawers, and plastic tubs from their archive (the shelving units are wheeled into position, the tools are assembled) and begin to tinker with different combinations of beads. Once a color palette has begun to take shape among the samples, Ryan will then paint broad swaths of those rocky tones onto the foam (if the beading is pointillism, the undercoats are AbEx) and initiate the painstaking process of affixing each of the individual beads by hand. Glue, hammer, pin; glue, hammer, pin; ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

One might argue that this process is back to front. Logic would dictate that the most suitable approach would involve (1) faithfully transposing the skin of the fruit onto the foam, and (2) color matching the beads to the paint, thereby allowing the undercoat to dictate the configuration of the crust and ensuring an exact reproduction of our decaying sitter. But this is not a quest for verisimilitude—Ryan’s is not a representative art, not purely. More so, it is a celebration of the idiosyncrasies of the materials that she builds with—of their uniqueness, their extant character, their magic. Paint wants to be still: to hold its color as you move in relation to it. With beads, with glass, with gems, with all manner of crystalline fragments, you have flux, you have fluidity, you have a universe held in a marble. You have, as Ryan notes, “all of these nuances and changes in opacity and light.”¹ And in art, as in life, nuance should be sought out, treasured, and preserved—in all its many forms. For it should not be overlooked that, despite the irrefutable seduction of Ryan’s surfaces, we are not solely discussing the visual here. This is anything but decoration—even if the Bad Fruit take their inspiration from the delightfully gaudy craft kits that allow you to furnish your home with apples and oranges dotted with colorful rhinestones. (Ryan pays tribute to these humble progenitors in Hanging Fruit, 2018, a hulking cast iron sling with a delicate cargo.) In adorning her sculptures with an array of centuries-old gems, beads, and semiprecious stones, Ryan introduces to her work an artistic, historical, and cultural legacy of a scale far larger than one of her augmented fruits or flowers. With a near-meditative focus and a tongue held firmly in cheek, she pins, to the surfaces of her depictions of degradation and decay and breakdown, time: time contained, petrified, stuck in place.

Time buries itself within objects, so too stories and their various authors. They burrow deep, seek refuge, rest, return. Were you to run your hand across the exterior of one of Ryan’s bejeweled delicacies, you would find beneath your fingertips entire worlds to explore. Tigereye (Bad Lemon [Old Money], 2023), that dazzlingly named chatoyant gemstone, was once stockpiled in the tombs of ancient Egyptian pharaohs, who believed it would provide safe passage to the afterlife. Quartz crystal (Generator II, 2022), a form of colorless macrocrystalline quartz, has been associated with magic and power since prehistoric times, treasured for ritual use in Australia, South Africa, and the Americas. Malachite (Bad Cherries, 2021), a minor ore of copper that was mined near the Isthmus of Suez and the Sinai Peninsula as early as 4000 BCE, is said to defend against evil spirits. (Gertrude Stein’s text fragment “Malachite” is similarly, and characteristically, impenetrable: “The sudden spoon is the same in no size. The sudden spoon is the wound in the decision.”² ) In amber (Bad Lemon [Seed], 2024), which the ancient Greeks called elektron, we find the most effective of natural time capsules—surely the most elegiac, certainly the most poetic. In 2012 scientists discovered a spider that had become entombed in amber at the very moment that it was attacking its prey, an assault first initiated some 100 million years ago. That same year, researchers documented the oldest parasitic mite ever recorded, which had been frozen in an amber droplet in northern Italy 230 million years ago. “If thou couldst but speak, little fly,” Immanuel Kant once cooed to an unassuming insect preserved in a block of amber, “how much more would we know about the past.”³

But why lose ourselves within the past when we have so much to learn of, or from, the present? The best myths are those that we write ourselves, after all, those that we write together, and while Ryan might indulge in the bountiful richness of geology, her work is particular in its incorporation of far more contemporary fossils still. In Heart (2022), the extracted motor of a muscle car becomes the stone at the center of a segmented plum. In Pearls (2017) and Caprice (2016), bowling balls are reanimated as pearls and jewels, whereas in Untitled (Chandelier) (2015), a flock of hand-wrought parrots gather on the leaning skeleton of the titular as nature outlives a form of luxury consumerism that was always doomed to fail. To form the aluminum rinds of the Bad Melon (2020–24) series, Ryan segmented a secondhand Airstream travel trailer, that idealized emblem of American leisure and freedom. “We bought it from an eighty-year-old flea market dealer,” Ryan recalls. “It had been parked next to his house for twenty years. . . . Several boxes that we hauled out were covered in six inches of raccoon shit.”⁴ But as Ryan’s sculptures repeatedly emphasize, even the most rudimentary objects can become endowed with beauty and meaning when they are lived with, when they are loved. In exploring the Airstream, picking through the living archive that it had come to represent, “the piece gained significance. Going through everything that someone has accumulated over a lifetime is so emotional. . . . I felt like this trailer was rotting from the inside with these valuable personal mementos, but it had turned to trash.”⁵

When artists utilize found objects, they invite the world into their work. When Ryan encrusts a busted taillight with semiprecious stones, spins a quartz-coated web beneath the hood of a Volkswagen, rearticulates an art historical motif as an erotics of concrete-cast balloons, she pushes worlds together. There is something deeply tender about her respect for, belief in, and handling of these worlds—for it is handling, always; there are hands, always. It is Ryan who prowls the junkyards, drags the hoods to her studio, scrubs the rust from their weary backs. It is Ryan who mixes concrete, pours concrete, polishes concrete to give the impression of effortlessness. It is Ryan who leaves the imprints of her fingerprints on the wings of her parrots. It is through this labor, she says, this touch, “[that] you get really intimate with the thing”—an inadvertent yet fitting reference to Martin Heidegger’s 1950 lecture “Das Ding” (The thing), in which the philosopher wrestles with the notion of “thingness,” in contrast to “objectness.” Ryan continues: “Part of what I love about bringing trash into the studio is cleaning it up. It’s very generous.”⁶ Salvage, repair, release. If we were to trail Heidegger at a distance, we would learn that objects become things when they can no longer fulfill their conventional roles and, as such, become visible in new ways. It would follow that, in her prioritization of the used and used up over the new, Ryan does not concern herself with the object but indeed with the thing—with that which, void of its original function, can now be seen as a receptacle for not only time but all that occurred within it. As a fossil, ripped from the rear end of an Airstream.

It is easy to become distracted by scale when scale is intentionally distracting. A fresh slice of melon brushes against your hip. A daisy chain outgrows a gallery. A pearl necklace hangs over the lip of a reinforced wall. The leaves of Ghost Palm (2019), a reconstruction of a Washingtonia filifera palm tree that was installed in Palm Springs in 2019, drifted some twenty feet aboveground. But what one should consider, when navigating one of Ryan’s swollen objects, is not the novelty of that which has been expanded, but the sheer beauty of that which has been allowed to remain at its original dimensions. For Claes Oldenburg, an artist who made his name in enlargement, “the main reason for the colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel—the object.”⁷ For Ryan, by contrast, enlargement is a means to focus the eye on the constituent parts of that vessel (be they a bowling ball, a seedpod in rose quartz, or crystal balls like dewdrops on leaves), on the minutiae that are often overshadowed by that to which they bring detail. It’s something like placing sand beneath a microscope. Something like bringing a galaxy into focus. Something like lifting a gem to the light, lifting a gem to the eye, and watching its (im)purities sing. In scaling up, in allowing us, entreating us, to better scrutinize the finer details, finer details that in and of themselves contain a multitude of hours, associations, and past lives, Ryan initiates, via a literal change of perspective, a change that is far more profound still. She reveals, revels in, posits a revaluation of the sheer abundance of the overlooked.

Perhaps naturally, perhaps irrationally, while thinking about Ryan’s slow, measured, ever-so-meticulous processes of assembly, I have become preoccupied with hands and with skin. In hands, when observed at a distance, we have forms that are not identical but are somewhat interchangeable. There are those that deviate, naturally or otherwise. There are those that clench while others fall limp. But it is the skin that tells of the individual. It is the skin that wears history, that, like Sanskrit etched on the puttylike surface of a palm leaf, holds life. Look close—pick at the callouses, trace the ridges, read the lines as if a map—and you will find evidence of full-lived lives of labor or love, of self-preservation or of ruin, of things that have happened, are happening, will happen still. “Skin was earth; it was soil,” Annie Dillard writes of her childhood fascination with the skin of her parents and grandparents. “I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit in the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.”⁸ We can remove God, if you would rather, but we should keep the specks, for it is there, in those trapezoids of dust, that we store our history, build it. And it is there, in or on the skins of Ryan’s sculptures, that we can glimpse time told in triplicate. The time of the artist, the time stowed within the objects, the time of all those who held them before. Time-crafted; time, crafted.