Born in 1956 in Plymouth, Montserrat and raised in England, Veronica Ryan OBE, RA, creates meticulously handcrafted work using a wide range of materials, including bronze, plaster, marble, textile, and found objects. Her sculptures and installations examine environmental concerns, personal narratives and memories, as well as the wider psychological implications of history, trauma and recovery. 

Ryan has studied at St. Albans College of Art and Design, Bath Academy of Art in Corsham Court, The Slade School of Art at University College, London, and The School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. Over her forty-year career, she has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and residencies within the UK, the US, and abroad. Her first one-person exhibition was at Arnolfini, Bristol in 1987. Other important one-person shows have been presented at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (1988), Camden Arts Centre (1995), Aldrich Museum (1996), Salena Gallery, Brooklyn (2005), Tate St Ives (2000, 2005 and 2017), The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2011), The Art House, Wakefield, Yorkshire (2017); Spike Island, Bristol and White Columns, New York (2024). In 2018 Ryan was awarded the Freelands Award by the Freelands Foundation in support of her exhibition at Spike Island in 2021. Ryan unveiled ‘Custard Apple (Annonaceae)’, ‘Breadfruit (Moraceae)’ and ‘Soursop (Annonaceae)’ in Hackney, London, as the nation’s first permanent monument to honor the Windrush generation in 2021, and in 2022 Ryan was included in the Whitney Biennial and awarded the Turner Prize, one the most prestigious prizes for visual arts in the United Kingdom. 

From March to July 2025 the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis, will present the artist’s first survey exhibition: Veronica Ryan: Unruly Objects, with four decades of work and over one hundred sculptures, textiles and works on paper. The exhibition will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio in August 2025 through January 2026. Ryan’s work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Tate, UK; the Arts Council Collection, UK; Contemporary Art Society, UK; Sainsbury’s Collection, UK; the Hepworth Wakefield, UK; the Weltkunst Collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art; and the Sharjah Foundation, UAE, among others. 

Ryan currently lives and works both in New York and the UK.