You’ve heard of Pseuds Corner? Veronica Ryan’s exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery is a trip to Pseuds Cornershop. Here are yoghurt pots and teabags, avocado trays and fruit nets, all displayed and captioned with whispering reverence. The Doily: A Dissertation. It’s a frustrating show. I have a high tolerance for this sort of thing — recycling, make-do-and-mend, the whole stitching, patching scrap-bag of domestic virtues — and I still found it muted and mimsy.
Ryan, who won the Turner prize in 2022, has said: “I’m often interested in things that are supposed to be rubbish.” Her materials are a mix of scavenging and salvation. Nothing wasted, no cotton bud left behind. Paper hospital cups are squashed and arranged into a collage that is almost a sculpture in shallow relief. Worthless objects are wrapped in string bags and latticed fruit foam as if they were bodies in swaddling clothes or shrouds. Faced with a wall of these votive turtle-chokers, I had the sacrilegious thought: bung ’em in the bin. Not worth the shelf space.
Untitled (Magnolia Pod), 2024 Matt Greenwood/Above Ground Studio
Chuck out the clutter and there is beauty here too. A still life assembled from stoneware recreations of plastic drink bottles and laundry detergents is like a Morandi for the slurp-and-chuck age. A ceramic tower of imitation water-cooler bottles is a very modern, very corporate sort of totem pole. She has fun with the porcupine contrasts of pincushions: the squish of the pillows and the spike of the pins.
Ryan was born in Plymouth, Montserrat, in the Caribbean and came to England as a young child. Her work often takes as its starting point a seed, a kernel, a whole fruit or bean pod. She casts magnolia seeds in bronze and ties them into a blackened bouquet. One magnolia seed is blown up a hundred times and cast in bronze. Fallen on the gallery floor, you start to imagine its parent tree, tall as the neighbouring office blocks.
Ryan rarely goes in for plinths — though the odd sculpture sits on a pouffe — preferring to lay her sculptures on the floor. She was struck on a visit to Nigeria by the way street-sellers would set out loofahs and other natural wares on the ground.
Veronica Ryan in Along a Spectrum, 2021Courtesy Alison Jacques and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo Lisa Whiting
At Hackney Central a trio of Ryan sculptures paying tribute to the Windrush generation — a giant custard apple, a breadfruit and a soursop in marble and bronze — sit directly on the paving slabs. In botany, flying seeds that are dispersed by air are known as “diaspores”. Ryan’s cocoa pods and mango seeds, carried in boats or boat-like trays, ask you to think about diasporas of all sorts.
She isn’t heavy-handed. The problem is more being so light touch as to make almost no impression at all. Strain as I might, I can’t see the message — or the merit — in her hanging tea-strainers, graters and sieves. At the back of the main gallery, hangs a display of crocheted sculptures like long, stretched stockings drying on a line. It’s a useful, if inadvertent, image for an exhibition that takes good ideas and stretches them thin.
★★★☆☆
Whitechapel Gallery, London, Apr 1 to Jun 14, whitechapelgallery.org