Published:
Claire Ratinon
Veronica Ryan and I are captivated by some of the same things. Plants and seeds, migration and diaspora, conversations and multitudes. As a grower of edible plants and a writer, it is the relationships between people and the natural world – how it shapes us and how we shape it, how seeds and plants carry our stories and how we carry them across generations – that has shaped my understanding of the world and my work. Ryan’s body of work speaks to what I have done and continue to do in excavating these themes.
My first encounter with Ryan’s work happened organically as I stumbled over her oversized sculptures of fruit from the Caribbean diaspora that she created in honour of the Windrush generation. This was in 2022, at a time when I was wrangling with my own relationship to heritage and land and edible plants. The three sculptures appear as though having sprung from the earth outside Hackney Town Hall, a place I’d cycled past many times on the way to the market garden in Stoke Newington where I learned the skills of growing food. There is a custard apple which is a fruit beloved by the artist and also my parents; a breadfruit which is an exemplar of colonial botany, brought to the land of Ryan’s ancestors – Monserrat – as well as the land of my own – Mauritius – by the exploits of marauding Europeans alongside a soursop, a fruit I came to know from trips to Ridley Road Market.
I’d left Hackney for the East Sussex countryside two years prior to encountering these strange fruit, and was deep in the editing process on a book that I wrote to untangle and re-tangle the threads of migration, seeds, ancestry and earth that are woven through my life. It is these themes that I see on encountering Ryan’s work once more in Multiple Conversations. Although Montserrat and Mauritius are around 8500 kilometres apart as the crow flies, the botanical, gustatory, material and cultural overlaps are striking. A reminder of how the tentacles of colonialism and the meanderings of migrations (forced or otherwise) have forged deep connections across and throughout the planet and its peoples.
In the main gallery space, there is a flash of blue green suspended from the ceiling that pulls my attention. Untitled 2025 is a hanging sculpture fabricated from netting punctuated with small bronze casts of cashew nuts. As with many of Ryan’s pieces that borrow from organic forms as well as directly use them, the inclusion of cashew nuts gestures towards both the historical and contemporary influence of colonialism on botany and food systems.
Transported to India from Brazil by way of West Africa by Portuguese explorers in the 16th century (around the same time that they were “discovering” Mauritius), the cashew tree was initially introduced to address coastal erosion. For its transformation into an edible product, the cashew nut requires a multi-layered production process and one key step of this operation – extracting the nut from the shell – releases a caustic fluid that can severely burn the skin. In the places where cashew nuts are processed by workers (as opposed to by machines), those who undertake that labour – most of whom are women, some that are children and a number whose labour is forced from them – are exposed to grave health risks to ensure an uninterrupted supply for consumers who can afford to buy these expensive nuts.
Through the frequent use of fabrics and fibres, the presence of Ryan’s mother in her work feels palpable given that she taught the artist the skills of sewing, crochet and quilting. Ryan’s mother, Eleanor’s influence can be seen in the intricacy of the quiltwork of Safe Spaces, 1988-2019 and in the ubiquity of doilies incorporated into a number of Ryan’s pieces, some of which belong to her. This mode of presentation is reminiscent of the home I grew up in which was replete with doilies, made by my mother, upon which precious ornaments were displayed. They were both a decorative flourish and a reminder that what sits atop was not to be touched. The inviting tactility of Multiple Conversations VII, 2020 alongside the gallery’s reminders to ‘Please Do Not Touch’ evoke a familiar feeling of childish temptation. Mercifully, I’m well trained enough to resist.
My mother, now retired, returned to the practice of crocheting in the deep boredom of pandemic lockdowns, creating delicate blankets and even a cardigan for me to feel her embrace while social distancing kept us apart. I recall remarking on how clever she must be to hold the patterns and complicated mathematics in her head, figuring out and correcting mistakes as she flicked the needle back and forth. She batted away the compliment, ever dismissive that she could be considered talented or creative or smart. In introducing her to Ryan’s work, appreciated as it is, I hope to convince her that the skills she now uses to make hats for babies undergoing hospital treatment are the same as those of an artist – and her mother – whose art is exhibited in a gallery.
A number of Ryan’s pieces use crochet and netting in a manner that resembles fishing nets in which various objects – plastic bottles, plant detritus, seeds – are caught. As the granddaughter of an accomplished fisherman who could not read the written word but could expertly interpret and navigate a portion of the coast off his island home, the physicality of these nettings speak to me. They were the essential apparatus of his livelihood, which he would diligently mend during inclement weather. Yet they have come to represent the negligence of industrial fishing. I mostly see the fragments of this plastic discard littering the beaches near to where I now live.
Such is Ryan’s fascination with that which humanity sees fit to throw away – from these fishing nets to plastic bottles, fruit skins and trays for transporting vegetables – that she centralises them in her work, taking the seemingly unremarkable and transforming it into something that insists on being seen. One could argue that it is the efficiency of waste disposal that enables a culture of carelessness around what gets thrown away, and so by asking us to look again at what we get rid of and displace responsibility for, we are compelled to realise that out of sight ought not be out of mind. Solidifying plastic bottles in ceramic sculpture as Ryan does in Totem 2026 further emphasises the perpetuity of the objects we treat as disposable.
Reconsidering what we view as waste and what we do with it is akin to the act of composting to which I’m deeply devoted. Attending to what is discarded, coaxing it through an alchemical process and witnessing it transform into something fertile, life-giving and generative is a magical thing. Anything that compels us to be in continued relationship with what we use and then dispense with, and the impact that has on the world around us is a necessary and urgent intervention. Our planet is crying out for humanity (and by that, I mean, capitalist industry) to tread more lightly.
It is into this compost that the seeds I sow will germinate and grow and it is to the seeds that feature throughout Ryan’s work that I find myself returning. Seeds sown deep into a tapestry, bronze casts of seeds bound in string, drift seeds caught in fishing nets and hung from the wall. Seeds that transport in their DNA the imprints of all their past lives, seeds that carry the stories of our ancestors, and these same seeds holding within them the potential for life to continue should they meet welcome earth into which they might grow.
On the day that I visited the exhibition, I ran into a friend, comrade and fellow plantsperson on the street heading in the same direction. We walk into the gallery together talking quickly about many things from land justice to creative practice to emotional labour. We parted ways to look at Ryan’s work but found ourselves standing side-by-side next to the piece Drift Seeds. My friend, like me and like Ryan, is somewhat akin to a drift seed. A coalescence of migrations, a descendant of disaporas, a being that came to dwell on this land by force of weather systems and tidal flows and human intervention, determined to grow and flourish in this otherwise earth.
Drift seeds, and those who embody what they symbolise, mean much to me in my imaginings and hoping for a world that might exist beyond the petty nationalisms and arbitrary borders that determine so much of the tenor of politics these days. Being a ‘product of more than one country’ as a liberatory prospect instead of one used as a precursor to exile.
© Claire Ratinon, May 2026
