Review of the Week: Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations

Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, until 14 June

“My mother was always recycling things, not that she called it that,” says the artist Veronica Ryan. “I’ve grown up repurposing things when I didn’t have any resources.” Much about this deceptively simple statement hints at various aspects of the wide and texturally wonderful oeuvre of the British artist, who was born in Montserrat in 1956, relocated to the UK with her family when she was an infant, and won the Turner prize in 2022. 

Ryan uses everyday objects sometimes as casts for her sculpture, but often to make the work itself: pillows, bandages, matchboxes, doilies, yarn, paper, thread, netting, plastic bottles, rugs, lace, upholstery tape, pins, seeds, feather, egg cartons, tea bags, fishing line. (I’ll have to stop, or at least half the review could consist of the ordinary substances that Ryan, with her subtle arrangements, deftly makes extraordinary.) 

In this sense, we might think of the maternal inheritance of recycling as key to her work: at once a making-do, a canny ability to reuse, and a gifted eye for what in the universe around us might shapeshift and become new if combined with innovation or altered in context. The second phrase in Ryan’s statement is the more incisive, however: “not that she called it that” – a reminder that most agile and fascinating contemporary art operates at many different levels and across meanings. No material, no shape, form, reference, image, idea, after all, means only one thing. 

The same is true of exhibitions, and the Whitechapel’s installation of Ryan’s work, which stretches across three gallery spaces, is aptly organic rather than linear – more than 100 works from across the decades (the mid-1980s to present day) are interspersed according more to form and theme, tendency and rhythm, than any fixed idea of chronology or evolution. In the first gallery space in particular – the vast ground-floor room through which one enters – sculptures stand, sit, hang bold and bright, with each angle producing new sightlines and rhymes between works new and old, prompting the viewer into a kind of visual agility. 

The result really is a sense of “multiple conversations”, as the show’s title suggests: materials and shapes echo, invert and reappear in different combinations, scales, orientations, purposes. Totem (2026), for instance, is made of ceramic casts of plastic bottles painted blue and glazed, shiny and stacked vertically, as if the length of a single bottle has extended to eight times its height, or swallowed other bottles, or is in fact still growing, like a beanstalk, each moment our back is turned. 

Nearby, Systems & Microbes I, II, and II (all 2022) use real plastic bottles, this time crumpled up and enclosed in fine aquamarine netting (Ryan’s work has an incredibly haptic quality: looking at the bottles you can almost feel them in your hands, hear the crinkle-crunch we’re so familiar with). Suspended from the ceiling, they hover like clouds, jellyfish, the tangles of ocean waste that we know clog so many waterways, pendulous sculptures à la Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois or El Anatsui – associations that, as in all of Ryan’s work, criss-cross the real, associative and art-historical. At a slight distance, on a low wooden shelf against a wall, sit six incredibly precise and elegant stoneware versions of plastic bottles (depending on your proclivities, you might recognise Ecover washing-up liquid). Entitled Still Life (Bottles) (2025), they are like an uncanny contemporary Morandi painting turned 3D. 

In other displays, it is the seedpod that repeats: real, cast in clay, plaster, bronze, patinated and not, coloured in candy hues like Jordan almonds, big, small, on plinths, nestled in craters, painted on canvas, of different varieties and species, indigenous to lands near and far. The seed, like an artwork, is a container that holds possibility, has edges and confines, keeps substances in and out, capable of travelling great distances, bringing life across oceans to pollinate or cross-pollinate, to plant new life from elsewhere in soils that might not be familiar, but in which it can thrive and spread, changing the landscape, even if just in a small patch – a garden – here and there. In many works across mediums, not just seeds but fruits, flowers, cellular forms, wild configurations of organic forms commingle, lie arrayed or stand solid and heavy, monumental. (Those familiar with it might recall Ryan’s Turner-winning Hackney Windrush commission: three large sculptures in marble and bronze – Custard Apple, Breadfruit, Soursop – that sit outside St Augustine’s Tower, a stone’s throw from Hackney Central station in London.) 

Part of the magic, always, is that these forms also verge on abstraction, figurative play, formal experiment. A gouache and graphite work on paper about volcanic eruptions in Montserrat is also a study in landscape and history, how geography past and present is animated through family stories handed down, making distant lands nearer, realer, palpable. A large wall-based sculpture made of lead and leather, seductively ridged and patterned, is incised with slits that resemble slivers or seeds, but also the repetitive mark-making of minimalist art. Silver bromide prints of Ryan and her sister as little girls, tidily dressed in their Sabbath clothes with hair bows and “lovely little bags”, are studies in memory and portraiture, but also – as each is covered over with different oblongs of black and white paint – formal compositions about how one and two can become separate, obscured, or fused. This is a joyful, confident, supple exhibition in which Ryan shows us how, in art as in life, any thing can go by many faces and names, can be transformed into anything.