The sculptor creates massive rotten fruits from precious stones: Aesthetics of decomposition

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Works by a New York artist Kathleen Ryan are a kind of response to the current culture of overconsumption. Sculptures of "rotten" fruits made from a variety of beads carved from precious stones serve as a protest manifesto. Kathleen deliberately uses precious and semi-precious stones to highlight the contrast between the material and our usual response to mold. Her sculptures demonstrate how thin the line separates the beautiful and the grotesque.

The studio where the miracle is born

A flock of fruit flies have gathered at Kathleen Ryan's studio in Manhattan. This is quite logical, because there is a whole bunch of huge decaying lemons and oranges. A small room is located in the attic of an old commercial building on Lower Broadway. It is all bathed in the sun. Kathleen rented this space a year ago and has since become her favorite creative studio.

Last May, Kathleen and her boyfriend, artist Gavin Kenyon, rented a huge warehouse in Jersey. Now the artist can easily engage in the creation of her monumental sculptures. The artist's extensive collection includes works based on various industrial objects and everyday objects. For example, fuchsia bowling balls, 35 of which she paired together to create a colossal necklace. The sculpture was named "Pearls". There, the artist is not constrained by the scale of the premises and the cramped space. It is in her favorite cozy Manhattan studio, which resembles a small studio, that she creates her most intricate works.

Scattered on several steel work tables are piles of giant oranges, lemons, peaches, grapes the size of a watermelon … Ryan makes the base from foam. Then he showered them with sparkling placers of semi-precious stones, similar to shells. Each gemstone - from dark green malachite, milky rainbow opal, smoky quartz, is hard and shiny in itself. Together, they mimic mold. A fungus known as green rot (Penicillium digitatum).

The sculptures are incredibly beautiful, they are a pleasure to behold. But at the same time, a certain ugliness and anxiety are associated with them. Luxurious ripe fruits resemble similar paintings by Dutch artists of the 17th century. Such as, for example, Jan Davids de Hem and Willem Claesz Heda. Also, these unusual works personify worldly excesses.

Flies gather over a bowl of real grapes. The fact is that Kathleen observed the slowly wrinkling skin of the fruit for several weeks. How they were gradually covered with a gorgeous green mold. The artist imitated this using amethyst, rose quartz and amazonite.

What Kathleen has done before

Kathleen Ryan, 35, has always preferred anything natural and fair to a sleek faux gloss. For three years she worked at the now defunct Carlson & Company factory in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. There she worked on various projects by famous contemporary artists. “I learned to take on really ambitious projects and bring them to the end,” says the artist.

Kathleen attended university. After she graduated with a master's degree in foreign affairs, she only wanted one thing - to create. Ryan says she just burned out emotionally as she poured over endless spreadsheets. Now she wanted to work with her hands, create something. Her work is closely related to tactile sensations. The artist spends half of each week in her TriBeCa studio, carefully piercing the foam of artificial fruits with steel pins. Each of which she had previously decorated with a bead made of a precious stone. It took Kathleen just over two months to create one such lemon. The fruit is covered with approximately 10,000 stone beads.

Kathleen's occupation was not accidental

Kathleen Ryan grew up in Santa Monica, California. In this warm land, oranges grow in abundance. Fruit of any kind is not uncommon. The idea came to mind by chance, while contemplating spoiled fruit. The artist immediately thought it was a symbol of decline.

In the beginning, the sculptures were more classical. In her first solo exhibition in 2016 at Josh's London Gallery, Lilly Kathleen presented her work, The Bacchante. It looked impressive: a cascade of concrete clusters the size of balloons, balancing on a dizzyingly large and thin marble column. After the artist moved to New York two years ago, she was fascinated by "rotten fruit".

Manifesto of protest against the degradation of the overconsumption society

Kathleen Ryan is constantly presenting new works. She hopes more and more of her work will be exhibited in the homes of wealthy private collectors, secretly conveying a truly dissident message. “They are not just rich. These people simply have an inherent sense of decline, some kind of decay. It is also happening today in the world: the economy is developing, and inequality in wealth is only growing. All this happens at the expense of the environment. It's like a self-destruct mode is on,”says Kathleen.

Most interestingly, artificial glass beads are used to create areas of ripe skin of the beautiful fresh fruit. Rotting patches are created with precious stones. The artist says: "Although mold is rot, it is still the living part of spoiled fruit."

Things don't always look the way we think they should. If you want to know from what perfumers create the most exquisite scents, read our article - animal perfumery.