Essays, Issue 10

Kathleen Ryan

Appetite and Aftermath

Words JAE KIM

Photography SHANA TRAJANOSKA

The modern world is a landscape of seamless surfaces and glowing screens where disorder is systematically edited out. Objects arrive polished and optimized, their material histories scrubbed clean and their labor made to disappear. Kathleen Ryan’s sculptures disrupt this manufactured smoothness by pulling us into a reality where things stain, corrode, sag, and calcify. Time presses into her materials, treating transformation as something dense, excessive, and at times disquieting. At a distance, the glint of gemstones and the shimmer of pearls provide a seductive allure. A closer look reveals that this beauty complicates itself, as the allure begins to fracture and what gleams also rots. Ryan stages a confrontation between appetite and discomfort, refusing tidy conclusions while leaving a palpable tension in the air.

Her sculptures answer through weight, touch, and built-up strata, redirecting attention to the uneasy intimacy between attraction and deterioration. This commitment to physical resistance is immediately legible in her two-floor warehouse, which operates with two distinct tempos. On the ground floor, industrial force and structural transformation dominate the space. A rusted Volkswagen hood leans against a wall, its curves cut into wedges, while the skeletal frame of a mattress slouches into a posture that feels unmistakably human. Upstairs, the atmosphere narrows into a meticulous focus where light gathers over trays of stones sorted by tone and density. Steel pins slide through pearls as the work advances through a gradual buildup, allowing the outer layer to thicken slowly with time.

These sculptures operate between two modes: forceful material transformation and meticulous attention to finish. By working with what already exists, such as car parts, bowling balls, and discarded structures shaped by use and weather, Ryan allows the history of the object to remain visible. In her world, time remains embedded in the material.

Opposition sits at the core of this sculptural thinking, allowing luxury to meet corrosion and appetite to meet burden. In her 2015 sculpture Bacchante, concrete forms cluster together to recall celebratory balloons, yet their massive weight anchors them firmly to the ground. Ryan renders this exuberance in a sober, unyielding material because she is drawn to the friction between the two. “The Bacchante evokes sexuality and wildness, yet they’re made of concrete,” she explains. “That tension holds a trace of humor, but also the weight and burden that desire can carry.” These forms drape with a bodily slackness, suggesting the gravity that follows ecstasy.

If Bacchante concentrates weight, Barbed Wire (2017) disperses it across the floor. Bowling balls strung together by brass connectors snake through the gallery, their glossy surfaces marred by scratches and faded logos. Each sphere once promised leisure and competition; now they form a low barrier, a chain that recalls perimeter defense. The title invokes agricultural fencing, a technology of separation. Walking alongside the work produces a subtle shift in bodily awareness. The viewer navigates space differently, aware of constraint and threshold. Familiar objects shed their recreational identity and enter a new vocabulary of boundary and containment.

Familiar forms provide an immediate point of entry. Fruit, for instance, carries instant legibility. “When I think about fruit, I think of it as a universal object,” she says. “You don’t need context to recognize it. Anyone, anywhere, can relate to it.” This recognition draws viewers in. The wedge of citrus feels accessible, almost comforting. Yet its appearance complicates that ease.

In Blood Orange (Bad) (2023), the cross-section of an orange rises like a geological specimen. Garnet, lapis lazuli, amethyst, rhodonite, and glass cluster across its face, their colors pooling into bruised reds and deep purples. The rind glows with pale mineral strata while the interior appears dense, cellular, almost vascular. What might have been a slice becomes terrain. The fruit bears the marks of pressure and sediment. “But fruit is never just fruit,” Ryan notes. “It carries the history of still life and centuries of looking, which is why people form such immediate emotional connections to it.” That history lingers here, even as the form pushes beyond pictorial tradition into something visceral.