Veronica Ryan

Veronica Ryan (born 1956, in Plymouth, Montserrat) is a British artist whose sculptural practice explores memory, migration, healing, care, and the layered histories of Caribbean and diasporic life. Working across sculpture, installation, assemblage, and drawing, Ryan examines absence, resilience, inheritance, and belonging through delicate arrangements of organic and manufactured materials, including seeds, pods, textiles, bronze, plaster, and found objects.  Ryan studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Slade School of Fine Art, and the University of London’s Institute of Education. Her work often engages botanical form, domestic space, loss, and postcolonial memory, using repetition, casting, stitching, and material juxtaposition to consider how personal and collective histories are carried through bodies, objects, and everyday acts of preservation. Her sculptures frequently evoke containment and fragility while attending closely to the afterlives of displacement and the sustaining forms of care that emerge within diasporic experience.  Her work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, the Hepworth Wakefield, the Brooklyn Museum, Spike Island, and in major international exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial. She received the Turner Prize in 2022, becoming the first Black woman to win the award. Veronica Ryan lives and works in New York and Bristol.