Veronica Ryan OBE

Arrangement in Layers, Stacking Up Moments comprises ten structures made of closely stacked layers of cardboard avocado trays, piled upwards or resting on their sides, and arranged in a loose grouping on the floor. Some of the trays are glued together. The artist cut a circle through each stack and created ‘tubes’, or sacs, that transect the trays and hold them together. These tubes are made of crochet structures, dyed in different colours and sewn to the stacks of trays. Some of them contain seeds.

Ryan has worked with fruits and seeds throughout her career, for example in works such as Relics in the Pillow of Dreams 1985 (Tate T06530), Quoit Montserrat 1998 (Tate T07770) and Mango Reliquary 2000 (Tate T07771). She has been both bemused and pleased about the recent popularity of avocado on toast in Britain. She recalls first having avocado on bread in the early 1960s, on a childhood visit to her birthplace of Montserrat, her family having left the country when she was still an infant. 

The work was made over a long period, between 2016 and 2019, allowing the artist time to engage with the physical properties of the materials. Ryan had been collecting fruit and vegetable trays and containers for many years. She collected a few hundred avocado trays, explaining to shop keepers that she was working on a project and asking them to save the undamaged ones. The avocado trays come in a few different tones, ranging from grey to blue and violet, and for this work the artist arranged them according to colour. Recycling has been an essential part of Ryan’s practice. Her interest partially relates to a practice recounted by her mother from when she was a child, when flour sacks, made of a robust yet fine quality cotton, were used and embroidered to make pillowcases.

Ryan has previously worked with stacks and strata, forms which preserve the entity of the whole as well as the individuality of the separate parts, as well as suggesting a process of sedimentation through time and evoking both stability and vulnerability. Ryan’s works generate from and reverberate with a multiplicity of references and associations. She has explained that, ‘Sewing seeds, reaping what you sow, seeding the oceans (referencing climate change), are some of the idioms I find relevant and compelling’ (correspondence with Tate curator Elena Crippa, 12 October 2020).

For the psychoanalyst Christine Schmidt, Ryan’s stacks of objects, compressed and sutured, conjure both comfort and pain. She has commented that Ryan’s work ‘speaks to trans-generational inherited trauma, colonized definitions of mental illness and wellbeing and the dialectical relationship between the landscape of our interior and exterior worlds’ (Christine Schmidt, ‘Inherited Trauma’, in Veronica Ryan, Salvage, exhibition catalogue, The Art House Wakefield 2017, p.36). Additionally, Arrangement in Layers, Stacking Up Moments evokes both trauma and the pursuit of healing and wellbeing. The artist has pointed out that activities like crocheting have mindful, soothing benefits (correspondence with Tate curator Elena Crippa, 12 October 2020). Of the processes involved in Arrangement in Layers, Stacking Up Moments specifically, she has stated: 

Stacking up a history of events and memories, thinking of geological structures, the way geological events are measured according to sediments and strata structures. Tree rings offer up information about the age of trees, and historical moments in time. I see parallels with measuring memories in time and space. Histories, psychological processing and narratives as constructs. The repetitive motion of crocheting is reminiscent of moments in time, also a therapeutic activity helpful to psychological wellbeing, and contributing to helping with trauma.

(Correspondence with Tate curator Elena Crippa, 12 October 2020.)

Further reading
Michael Tooby, ‘Material Nature’, in Veronica Ryan, Salvage, exhibition catalogue, The Art House Wakefield 2017, pp.26–31.

Elena Crippa
October 2020