Virginia Ryan

Virginia Ryan was born and educated in Australia, attending the National School of the Arts in Canberra [77-79] where she briefly taught photography as a fine art medium before moving to Egypt in 1982. She also has a post graduate diploma in Art Therapy from the Edinburgh University Settlement school Of Art Therapy [95]. She is a professional exhibiting artist.

Since 1982 she has lived and worked in Italy, Egypt, Brazil, Yugoslavia and Scotland.

She presently lives and works in Umbria and Accra, Ghana, exhibiting frequently in Italy and abroad. Between 1996 and 1998 she has also taught at workshops with Italian and foreign students in the Umbria region and collaborated on a number of exhibitions such as ‘Trevi Occhio Giovane’ at the Flash Art Museum and “Viaggatori Sulla Flaminia’ in the summer of 1998, which was featured on Australian Arts National in August 1998.

Virginia Ryan’s work has been concerned with issues such as dispossession, exile and homelessness, which she sees linked not only to her own peripatetic career and life of travel, but with the need for a spiritual, psychological and material ‘place’ within everyone of us. These issues, constant in her art-making became overt during the years from 1990 to late 1993 when she lived in Belgrade and witnessed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

Works completed in Italy have included the photographic/collage series ‘Cancelli walks’ (97) where images of a young boy carrying flowers hint at quattrocento angels. The boy is her own son and the flowers were collected in the remote hamlet of Cancelli which is regarded by many local people as a sacred site.

The idea of walking is intrinsic to this piece as it is to the various shoe installations for which she has become known. For the exhibition ‘Travelers Along The Flaminia’ in the summer of 1998 Ryan created an Installation entitled “Cento Passi’ consisting of one hundred pairs of shoes donated by the people of Trevi, a hill-town in Umbria. Each contributor was asked to write the story of his/her shoes, thus creating a collective poem and an exercise in contemporary anthropology . After this, photos of the shoes were hand-manipulated, exhibited separately and a series of livre d’artiste were created using both the words and images from the installation.

In 2000, the association Orfini Mumesister and the Umbria region, in collaboration with the artist, produced a catalogue of photos and text of this project.

The shoe, transitional object par excellence, is repeated in other works such as the terracotta series produced in late 1998, entitled ‘Atopians’ . In these Ryan re-appropriates the once-fired white baby shoes from the ceramic workshops in the town of Deruta [used to hold confetti at baptisms] and transforms them into the remains of imaginary infant warriors.

In Ryan’s world fragility becomes a symbol of resistance, in opposition to the arrogance of power.

Ryan uses a variety of techniques in her art - from drawing, acrylic painting on wood to terracotta, photography and sound installations etc. She has collaborated with musicians and composers such as Prof. Nigel Osborne in Scotland, and Italian actors such as Pino Grossi and Graziano Sirci to create time/based works which occur alongside her sculptural or pictorial works.

In the year 2000 Virginia Ryan began a large new body of work based on the female figure, the first part of it being shown in the international exhibition A utoredonna in Livorno (where she was asked to represent Australia) and later in the year under the heading ‘Woman looking at Woman ‘at the Galleria Miralli in Viterbo, Italy.

Ryan has also recently completed a book entitled ‘Where the Cypress Rises-An Australian artist in Umbria’ based on her experience of living in Italy .This narrative/diary was published by Lothian press, Melbourne, Australia in September 2000. (www.lothian.com.au.)

In 2001 Virginia Ryan is writing a sequel telling the story of her family’s move to Accra,Ghana, .She presently divides her time between Ghana and Italy, between writing and image-making.

Ryan is creating a new body of work "Landing in Accra" with sign-writers in Accra which will be presented at the National Museum of Ghana in late 2001.