In late 2018 Virginia Ryan travelled from Italy to Victoria for residencies at the Balmoral

‘Post Office Studio’ and ‘Off the Rails’, Dunkeld in the Southern Grampians.

At this time and during a further period in late 2019 and early 2020 she furthered the projects “I Will Shield You’ and ‘Utopia Dystopia’. Both projects began in West Africa and Italy and were furthered in Australia.

Four ‘shields’ and a series of works on paper from this time in Australia are exhibited.

The shields are intuitive, highly textured and layered works which incorporate memory items from community members who visited her Australia-based residencies .

Shields have traditionally had a protective function. Virginia’s shields, through labour-intensive creation have become visionary power objects standing like guides leading us through and beyond cultures of fear, whether they be shared fears of global warming or perceived inventions of ‘the other’. These presences stand and face us while reflecting back our own imaginings, yet beckoning us to go beyond them.

Virginia continued a quiet exploration of her birth country through works on handmake paper in late 2019 and early 2020 as bushfires raged and the Covid pandemic began. Unable to return to Italy, she continued working first in Victoria and then in Aldinga South Australia. Her works express cultural nomadism and transnational belonging while exposing dystopias and utopias of these times.

Over decades, Ryan has cultivated an artistic practice intertwined with life experiences, of cultural nomadism and transnational belonging. The narratives in her works are deliberately enmeshed in a world of the handmade, transforming personal or collective imaginings into universally relevant works of cultural and artistic complexity.

“In this  unique series of shields of the cycle ‘'I Will Shield You' often completed with multiple reams of string spooled over and woven across the surfaces of circular forms, Ryan's work takes an even more poetic turn. The utilisation of such visual effects can travel beyond their mere representation as art objects; they arise out of a process where in materials are transformed into living organisms of a sort. The threads act as strands binding together personal, political and historical memory at once, forming a kind of surface upon which we might reflect our own experience. Their intense manual weaving is an attempt at thinking through the connectivity of Ryan's life which began in Australia, one marked by the undeniable privilege of her own familiar yet distant experience, as well as those undocumented lives silenced by history or submerged among the cries of oppression.  These works are used to elaborate an entangled set of narratives belonging as much to the artists as they do the communities, families, bodies and fictions that inform her life”

Osei Bonsu, London 2016