October 1, 2025
When thinking of an artist whose work could embody the oxymoronic tensions of recyclate, Kathleen Ryan immediately came to mind. The New Jersey-based artist has produced a striking body of work combining industrial leftovers and ready-mades to form figurative and often naturalistic sculptures of moulding fruit. Old mattresses, car fenders, motor blocks, cans, springs and chains are rearranged to form sculptural Stillleben of clusters of grapes, lemons and berries. Three-dimensional canvases of industrial found objects adorned by glass pearls, rhinestones, minerals, rocks and semiprecious gemstones, or entirely naturalistic sculptures of rotting raspberries, mouldy toast or decomposing lemons. The results are simultaneously Dutch Golden Age and pop art. Bejewelled everyday artefacts reborn as intriguing crossbreeds between Claes Oldenburg sculptures and Fabergé eggs.
In her studio, I find an abandoned pickup truck being harvested for organs to be reborn in new artworks. A motor block is being cast into concrete to form a peach pit. Fenders are being reborn as lemon peels, the hood as melon rind, doors as clamshells. An enormous rotting raspberry reveals a cavernous interior world of quartzite and pyrite growing like stalagmites and stalactites from the floor and ceiling. At a glance, a naturalistic depiction of decaying perishables. On closer inspection, abstract compositions or geological landscapes. The biosphere meets the geosphere.
The healthy living tissues are decorated with rigorous regularity. Repeating patterns of glass beads and plastic pearls. Orderly and ordinary. In the decaying regions, the order literally decomposes, leaving room for improvised eruptions of semiprecious stones, pearls and minerals. From ordinary to extraordinary. The chaos of death and decay forming islands of exceptional beauty in a sea of sameness.
As you step back, the abstract ornamental geometries coalesce to form literal depictions of rotting stains, runny bruises and 50 shades of mould. But within this microcosmos exists a macrocosmos. Lemons and cherries are like planetary bodies. The mouldy toasts embody the beautiful colours of a tropical sunset. Grottos and canyons, landscapes and territories. Each decaying artefact is like a society in transformation. Cultures of bacteria, clusters of molecules, a single edible element as the emergent apparition of a multitude of millions of cells. And as you keep stepping away, you rediscover the large elements of discarded machine parts. The morphological kinship between biology and technology. Waste upcycled from scrap to sculpture through the intervention of trinkets and knick-knacks. The coat of fake jewellery and bijouterie increases the value of the raw material by several orders of magnitude, as it is reborn from the junkyard to the art gallery. At its core, Ryan’s work is the artistic resurrection of landfill content of all scales, from XS to XL. Elements of negligible material value imbued with beauty and meaning to grapple the macabre and the sublime. To discover purpose in the discarded, to reveal poetry in putrefaction. Baudelaire in built form. As the ultimate oxymoronic potential of recyclate as a building material, her work is the ultimate alchemical act of transmutation of matter. To turn trash into treasure.
