BODIES AND FICTIONS

By Virginia Ryan

Virginia Ryan is an Australia-born artist (Echuca, Victoria 1956), art therapist and cultural activist who graduated from the Canberra National School of Arts (78). She has postgraduate studies in Art Therapy (Edinburgh University, Scotland 94) and Gestalt (Perugia, Italy 2021).

Since 1980, Virginia has worked internationally within the disciplines of painting, photography, sculpture and installations. She has worked both solo and with artists, anthropologists and musicians, collaborating with institutions such as New York University, and co-founding the Foundation for Contemporary Art, (FCA) Ghana (ongoing) and Faire L’Art Pas La Guerre NGO in Ivory Coast. She is presently based in Italy. 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.

Five ‘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 in Balmoral and Dunkeld in Victoria in 2018. Returning to Balmoral, Victoria and then Aldinga, South Australia in 2019 to 2020 Virginia continued an exploration of her birth country through works on handmake paper as bushfires raged and the Covid pandemic began. Her works express cultural nomadism and transnational belonging while exposing dystopias and utopias of these times.

Her works transform personal and collective imaginings into universally relevant works of cultural and artistic complexity.