Celebrating a rich and vibrant clash of colours, textures, patterns and cultures Melbourne artist Ann Ryan continues to transform discarded domestic textiles in her fantastical and poetically elaborate fabric collages. Carefully cut and hand stitched, her images are joyfully playful yet also affirm the quiet strength and power that resides within the feminine.
When I was a young girl the comment was made to me, “At least you have a long neck”. It was a backhander of course, but this unexpected comment has become fodder for my creative thoughts. My first ‘Long Necked Beauty’ was created in 2017 and the concept behind it has stayed with me, morphed and continues to grow as I develop as an artist. In this new, glorious exploration of the ‘Long Necked Beauty’ series, works are presented as metre high panels. The images are sisters, but not twins. Each is unique in their own details and stories.
Texture plays an integral role in my work, pattern on pattern and it is important to me as an artist that the viewer sees my hand in the art, hand-cut and hand-stitched. There are no blades or stencils used in my studio, just scissors. The stitching is a simple running stitch, with a few made up stitches along the way. The loose threads are deliberately left, but not planned. While their title springs from a moment of being caught off guard, the work does not. Rather they emerge from an enduring love of the interplay of textiles, colour and stitching, and the beauty of the long neck. Ann Ryan, Artist Statement
Catalogue essay by Laura Kirkham The title of Ann Ryan’s latest exhibition at Flinders Lane Gallery came from a backhanded compliment she received when she was young – that at least she had a long neck. Yet, Ryan didn’t use this as a conceptual stepping stone for a politicised spin on women’s beauty standards, or the male gaze, nor is the exhibition a negative lamentation on the past. Typical of the artist’s work, there is instead an inherent sense of joy and play; a tongue-in-cheek reinvention of this unexpected observation. The Long Neck Beauty: The Glorious Series is a celebration of colour, stitching, textiles and life. It is not shy work, it is work that celebrates the nuances of the feminine, and the stitches that bind collective experiences and memory.
Ryan created her first Long Neck Beauty in 2017 and the subject has stayed with her ever since, leading her to this latest body of work: a series of feminine profiles that sit with a strong presence on long, metre-high panels, each adorned with elaborate headdresses. These compositional elements emphasise the elegant elongation of Ryan’s figures to breathtaking effect, complimented by the ecstatic colour and dimension of Ryan’s materially-led practice. Each work is meticulously hand-cut and hand-stitched; the artist’s hand is present and significant in these works.
The grandeur of each headdress is determined by Ryan’s selection of fabrics, an intuitive response that allows for imagination to stitch its way into the work quite literally, with running stitches and French knots. The artist is not averse to a dropped stitch becoming a part of the finished work, these aesthetic moments mark the process and construction of the work. Here, so-called mistakes are an inherent part of the beauty of the work. Beauty is neither prescriptive nor perfect and perfection is not repetition.
The artist draws from a vast collection of fabrics when creating her work. These have been found, gifted and collected over the years. In her creative process, figures become imbibed with the past lives of these fabrics, and this circular economy of material and memory resonates through her work. Each figure is singular in its own construction and the past lives of the materials it celebrates. In this way, Ryan’s work and its figures share a collective femininity, rather than a shared identity, they are sisters, not twins. Their particularities elevate the notion of the individual and the collective memory at once.
This resonant sense of identity, felt within each work and in the evident hand of the artist is important to Ryan’s practice. With the rise of AI generated imagery and its removal of not only the artist’s process and conceptual practice, and its distinct lean towards clean and so-called-perfect imagery, Ryan’s work stands in resolute objection. What is essential to her, and her experience of art, is the emotive tactility of process and creation that captivates the viewer. This tactility is the well-trod boards of art history, where art and artists possess a crucial lens to perceive and interpret experience beyond the vocabulary of language, or technology.The Long Neck Beauty: The Glorious Series revels in the experience of life and the joy-filled, intuitive material processes that have become synonymous with Ann Ryan’s practice. These are works that invite their viewers to feel the joy of the feminine.
ARTIST PROFILE: 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. This will be her third solo with the gallery.
