Ann Ryan joined the FLG stable after winning the 2020 Exploration Emerging Artist Award for her meticulous and quirky fabric collages. In her second solo with the gallery, Ryan explores the exotic history of fashion - from 18th century hairstyles, to 60s & 70s fabric designs. Full of dream-like possibility, Ryan’s vibrant and highly detailed images take the viewer on a truly joyful journey of memorabilia and imagination.
For Ryan the creative process starts with hunting and gathering, creative conversations with friends, and often happy accidents too. While gleaning interesting fabrics and discarded items from others, she finds endless inspiration in the textures, prints or colours she collects. Through the act of cutting, folding and stitching, the everyday or overlooked morphs into something sumptuous and full of beauty.
La Pouffe Catalogue Essay by Elli Walsh 2022
The radiant textile collages of Ann Ryan sing of the simple joys to be found in fabric and thread, colour and pattern. Created from the artist’s extensive collection of fabric remnants, Ryan’s works celebrate the aesthetics of mundanity and the ethics of circularity. Personal and shared social histories collide as once-loved memorabilia trace the stylistic contours of material culture.
Ryan is a collector of the lost and found; a gatherer of stories. Her studio is crowded with containers of salvaged textiles – from her own life and those gifted by friends and family – each sorted and labelled according to pattern, print, texture. Japanese fabrics, vintage gloves, old garments, retro tea towels, antique kimonos, upholstery and haberdashery – tired remnants resurrected, and redeemed. Through this act of recycling, Ryan consciously invokes notions of sustainability and salvage, pushing back at our consumerist era, embracing the ethics of slow fashion and the circular economy.
In her latest series, the artist fortifies her fascination with head-dresses and the feminine currency of the silhouette. Adorned with elaborate remnants, each profiled figure becomes a stage for the theatricality of thread and the frivolity of fabric. We are treated to a jubilant performance as flora and fauna parade around the picture with certain joie de vivre. Colour, pattern and texture collide in a revelry of beauty and bounty, where notions of excess and visual opulence are an antidote to the social impoverishment Ryan felt within the context of Covid – the loss of incidental human exchange that would often inspire her work.
These collages are bright and buoyant certainly – lavish, even – and yet there is a humility that dwells quietly in the shadows of unwanted tea towels and disused gloves. We are reminded of the delight to be discovered in the discarded and the potentiality of the overlooked – an apt metaphor for life. A tired vintage tea towel becomes a blossoming crown, made even more majestic by its unlikely redemption. Native flora from tourist memorabilia sprout from feminine silhouettes, a symbolic act, perhaps, of maternity, femininity and self-expression. In other works we see the ubiquitous orange-hued flowers of mid-century textiles, harvested from their domestic utilitarian origins and reconfigured into a festivity of visuality.
Working slowly and intuitively, Ryan is guided only by colour and curiosity. She begins each piece by positioning her fabrics on foam-core to feel out the composition, allowing the materials to dictate the direction. Sometimes she hand-dyes the textiles, tinting them with tea or coffee to dull any jarring tones. The artist then stiffens the pieces with a hat stiffener before carefully sewing and gluing them onto mountboard. For Ryan, sewing is a form of mark-making akin to painting. It is meditative, subconscious. Gestural cotton stitches swoop across each composition like brushstrokes, fluent and fluid in their application, while loose threads resembling paint drips hang from the fabrics, creating a sense of spontaneity within the methodical framework that is sewing.
Colour is the master thread weaving together Ryan’s oeuvre. “We need colour in our lives”, comments the artist, simply and directly. Each work is a celebration of frivolity and fun, translated as a tapestry of vivacious hues. Colour is both instrument and melody, tool and theme, as Ryan harnesses its profound visual and emotional valences to bring us benevolent works that make us smile, and feel.
ARTIST BIO: Ann Ryan is a Melbourne based emerging artist with a background in retail fashion, having been a head buyer for Georges Department Store in the 1980s. More recently Ann has dedicated herself to developing a practice that unifies her interest in fashion and sustainability, completing a Diploma of Visual Art from Victoria University in 2011. She has exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions since graduating. Ann Ryan was the winner of the Exploration Emerging Artist Award for 2020.
