Virginia Ryan Visual Artist

Interview by Giusy Caroppo

from the INTRAMOENIA EXTRA ART_Castelli di Puglia

Volume 3 - Castelli del Salento

Editrice Rotas, Barletta 2008

Giusy Caroppo:

The female universe, memory, indigenous traditions, the relationship of the integrated ‘foreigner’ with local population…these are some aspects of your research. Can you briefly describe some recent projects?

Virginia Ryan:

‘Castaways’ is a ‘multisensorial’ project of 2,000 small collages created form ‘environmental data’ from the shorelines of West Africa, with an accompanying sound environment and film entitled ‘where water touches land’ by the sound artist Steven Feld - a meditation on the Atlantic and an exploration of a very significant place in the history of slavery and encounter.

‘Topographies of the Dark’- large scale sculptural paintings which then ‘resound’ in the musical improvisations of the African-American jazz group ‘Accra Trane Station’, just released in January 2008 in Santa Fe in New Mexico, and ‘Exposures - a White Woman in West Africa’ – 60 images of myself in everyday relationships with the people of Ghana in the period 2002-2005, which has been presented in Italy, America and Australia.

G.C. :

At Muro Leccese – for the work IN TRANSITU – you collaborated with a group of women embroiderers, very different in culture, social class and age, and from a small town of peasant extraction. What was their reaction to the proposal and the development of a complex project of contemporary art such as yours?

V.R.

I work in a delicate balance between a directive and non-directive relationship in such a group project, first of all creating a sense of the culture of the project being a ‘safe place’ and ensuring that the participants, in this case the 15 women from the Arakamare embroidery group, feel the power of their skills and that they have great personal authority. There was a sense of great collaboration, also thanks to the group organizer, Anna Maria Spano. The women were enthusiastic to participate and interpreted the idea of the installation in very personal terms, which I believe invested the finished opus with its ‘soul’.

G. C.

For the realisation of the work installed in Acaya you involved the sound artist Steven Feld. Why do you choose to include sound environments to a work which is already so visually powerful?

V. R. :

In the last few years, I have become more and more interested in collaborations and the idea of engaging multiple senses. Through this, I have also learnt to ‘hear’ again. In the case of Acaya, the intimacy and authority of the individual women’s voices gave both gravitas and poetry to the visual aspect and did engage the viewing public on a number of levels.

n.b. 15 hand embroidered linen and cotton pillowcases; sound installation by Steven Feld

? Virginia Ryan/Eclettica_Cultura dell’Arte (art director Giusy Caroppo)

The idea of suspension, suggested by the holy iconography of the “Dormitio Virginis” fresco, inspires the hand embroidering of words, evoking significant moments in life or universal principles, on some pillowcases; the same words are turned into a background melody. Produced by Muro’s Association “ArakAmare”, under the supervision of the master craftswoman Marilena Patisso, the handmade artwork has been realized during embroidery workshops, organized by the Association “La bussola”, thanks to Anna Maria Spano’s coordination activity and Maria Grazia Taddeo’s assistance. )

see t.v. interview on salentoweb

Cecilia Metelli interview for Spoleto Festival Exhibtion 2008

Why the title Multiple Entries?

For two reasons: firstly , because of so many trips to Africa, living there from 2001 until mid 2005, and afterwards coming in and out with a multiple entry permit which was granted to me for five years, to facilitate my work with the Foundation of Contemporary Art in the capital, Accra. Secondly, the work I have produced in Ghana explores a number of real places, such as the Anomabo site on the coastline, from a multitude of viewpoints. The viewer can find different ways to enter into the work, just as I found different ways to ‘know’ key points in Ghana.

The subtitle is ‘Africa e Oltre’. Where is this ‘Oltre’? This ‘ Beyond’?

In this exhibition the ‘Beyond’ is Italy.

Before first going to Africa in 2001, you were already living in Italy. Since when exactly ?

I had lived in Rome in the 80’s, but came to Umbria in 1995 and soon met artists in the area –the first was the American Jeffrey Isaac, who introduced me to Franco Troiani, who in turn invited me to work on projects such as the Viaggiatori Sulla Flaminia, for which I completed my first ‘community’ based work, entitled Cento Passi - One Hundred Steps.

Can you describe that particular project?

Briefly, it was a technique for me to ‘enter’ into the world of my new Italian neighborhood. I asked one hundred local people to give me a pair of worn shoes and tell me their story. They were portraits, in a sense. The work was also a tool for ‘finding my feet’ in a new place.

So you were also looking for ways to communicate with others?

It seems so. Before coming to Umbria my family had been living in Edinburgh where I had trained as an art therapist and therefore was aware of group dynamics, and issues such as the need for a ‘safe place’ through the writings of Donald Winnicott. This has been carried through in my work around issues of identity and territory, and is central to much of the Ghana-based work as well.

You were born in Australia, have lived in Egypt, Rome, Brazil, Ex Yugoslavia during the war , and then Scotland, Umbria and West Africa. Do you feel this moving as a weight or as a resource, in artistic terms? Have these places influenced your work?

Yes, Emidio de Albentiis also recently wrote about the ‘nomadic identity’, with respect to my work. Never have I been so affected by place as in Africa, although it seems Italy may be exerting a similar pull. It seems to coincide with life experience, with having ‘gathered’ so much visual memory through travel.

But one is aware in your work a contamination of different cultures which is translated into a visual richness.

Well, I certainly cannot claim to belong to a specific school or movement.

In projects such as ‘Exposures, a White Woman in West Africa’ and more recently your work with the women’s embroidery groups in Puglia and in the Quartieri Spagnoli in Naples, the female experience is central. Where does this interest in the position of women in society come from?

It goes back to art school in the 70’s in Australia, the feminist art movement which I was introduced to by the teacher and artist, Barbara Campbell. It’s strange how things come around again; recently I have been once again paying attention to the female position. It is quite a challenge in contemporary Italy, for example, where media images of women can be particularly ‘superficial’ – a limited and limiting surface. But in the ‘real world’ there is a very different story acting out.

You feel this strongly in Italy?

Yes. Women’s personal agency is constantly under attack, and visual representations in the media often tend to reinforce this .As an artist, I am interested in the power, the aesthetic and the poetry of authentic female experience, not facile projections. The first expression of this renewed concern was elaborated in Puglia in the exhibition Intramoenia last year, curated by Giusy Caroppo and Achille Bonito Oliva, where I worked with the Arakamare embroidery group .This year I will continue a similar line of investigation and installation in Naples, as you noted, and later on in the city of Foligno.

Can you say something about the ‘Exposures’ project?

Soon after arriving in Africa I decided to simply document my life, to use my own whiteness as a tabula rasa. In photography of contemporary Africa, there is a tendency to keep the non Africans out of the frame, as if they (we) contaminate the ‘authenticity’. But Accra is a cosmopolitan city, and I wished to represent the reality of being white in that context. Being a white woman, I was also ‘coloured’, and I wished to explore that. The photos were taken over a period of five years and illustrate aspects of gender, power and race in a post-colonial context. I recorded visually all moments, any moments: from an attack of malaria or shopping in the very mundane supermarket, to the Italian National Day Cocktail and meeting President Kufour. The photos also became the subject matter for a series of small paintings by Ghanaian artist Nicholas Wayo, who is known to those who saw the exhibition ‘Almighty God and the Apostles of Accra’ which was co-curated with Enrico Mascelloni in 2004.

So women’s experience on one hand and on the other, I remember your photographs of African men, dressed in gold?

The work is printed in two copies, one set of which is on permanent exhibition in the Certosa Di Padula. Here the three colours of black skin, white background and gold come together. I took portraits of thirty men, many of whom are artists, dressed in fishing net, painted gold, and surrounded them in hand-made fames constructed in the occupational therapy unit at the Accra psychiatric hospital.

So each man chose how to wear the cloth? There is great dignity in the way the cloth is worn, becomes a cloak…

Yes. When the portraits were shown in Padula some female viewers exclaimed that ‘even the ugly ones are beautiful’!

I could say that many of your projects are connected to a sense of place, such as the aforementioned ‘Cento Passi’ and your work in Africa.

Yes. The connecting threads are identity and memory. And these of course ultimately connect to place , to a territory, to a specific site.

What do you mean by memory?

For examples the ‘Castaways Project’ from Ghana, with soundscape by the American anthropologist and musician Steve Feld, is a ‘memorial’, in a sense, created with the discarded objects and environmental debris found on the shorelines of Ghana’s beaches. The work speaks of our present and past, and, as well, I am always imagining how these projects might look in the future. I began ‘Castaways’ in Anomabo, which is also the place photographed in the series ‘Captive Refractions’ . The fortress near the Anomabo beach was once a slave fort, then a prison. The photographed interior walls tell this story, still. Memory is ‘heavy’ there, of trading in gold, ivory and human cargo, and ships returning from Europe with leg irons and rum. Now, what the Atlantic throws onto the West African shore is mainly plastic from China, Europe, America. The shorelines of the world are choking in plastic.

Who collected all the environmental data for ‘Castaways’? Did you do it all alone?

I started alone but it grew to a point where two people helped me, and sometimes people from my neighborhood would also turn up at my little studio in Accra after a trip to Labadi beach, in the city, with a bag full of washed up flip-flops. Word spreads fast in my street over there. In a sense life is more public, due to the heat, and work is frequently performed outside. So people see me. Money is often hard to come by, so people look for ways to work.

Do you usually know just where you are going when you start a work?

I obviously have a sense of something potential, but allow the momentum to develop over time. I often find that people want to collaborate in some way, and that can be a joyful , unexpected process.

So something of other people finds its way into the work?

If someone else picks up something on the beach, for example, that becomes part of the story.

When did ‘Castaways’ begin?

I began in 2003, and have done approximately 2,000 small works to make up the whole. With Steve Feld, we also made a short film entitled ‘Where Water Touches Land’ describing the project. Then there is the sound environment , produced with hydrophonic microphones at Anomabo, which accompanies the work so that it become a multi-sensorial piece. When on show last year in Manchester, museum staff reported that viewers would sit down on the floor at the Whitworth Museum and listen, as if really on a beach.

You say that the next cycle, ‘Topographies of the Dark’ is in conversation with ‘Castaways’. Can you explain?

Before ‘Topographies’ I completed a cycle of images with found objects entitled ‘Blues for Charlie’, in blue, as the title suggests - but also a real explosion of colour. I needed to be released from the white-gold-grey of the Castaways. From there ‘Topographies’ was born and developed a life of its own, and is also made entirely from recycled materials. In 2007 I began to do a series in black bitumen and paint, ‘sculptural paintings’ made from hundreds of abandoned flip-flops, called ‘Charlie Woteys’ in Ghana. The series began after reading of a trip by the architect Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to Lagos in 2006, and the narrative of flying over that vast city. I then envisaged these works from the ‘birds eye’ view – as if flying overhead, somewhat like the point of view often depicted in Aboriginal painting in my native country, Australia. This coincided with continual power cuts where I was living in Accra, which there are referred to as ‘lights out’, and stories of oil spills off the coast of Nigeria. So I began thinking of Black. In April 2007, seeing some of these new works, a Ghanaian musician from the group ‘Accra Trane Station’ NiiNoi Nortey, expressed a desire to ‘sound’ the paintings which resulted in the jazz improvisations by the same name, produced in America and released in 2008 by Voxlox in Santa Fe’. One of these paintings has also recently been transformed into bronze in the D’Addario Foundry in Le Marche, Italy and into ceramic with the Sberna factory in Deruta, so that the once-abandoned object has been rendered somehow ‘prescious’ again.

How would you describe your relationship to your work? Does the project, the concept, take precedence over the finished object?

I am surprised by any artist who does not have an emotional, almost visceral connection to the finished product. But I give importance to the story of the work in progress. That is the very life ,its force.

What has the reaction been to the Topographies series in Ghana?

When exhibited last year, the initial reaction from African artists walking in to the gallery was, ‘oh you have started carving!’ To many ,the pieces evoked the detail and layered surface of Dogon doors, something that had never occurred to me. All this work has been exhibited in Ghana before coming to Europe and America, something which I believe is important in the history of the work.

I also remember the big portrait with photographic imagery?

Yes, that was a photo from 2004 of young men in Elmina castle, now a world heritage site, once a slave fortress. The image was reproduced on a plotter in Ghana and then hand manipulated.

How did you begin the shift to working in Ghana?

‘My first project was called ‘Landing in Accra’ hich was written about in detail by Achille Bonito Oliva. I had just moved into my little studio, but was aware of needing to get out and discover the city. Back then, I used to drive around and literally ‘get lost’ in order to familiarize myself with the streets, many of which do not have names. My reference points soon became the street artists , the so called ‘sign painters’ who work along the main roads. In a sense the ‘finding my feet’ story in Trevi was repeated in Accra by ‘mapping’ place with the sign-writers as indicators. In ‘Landing’ I asked each sign writer to complete a work on paper which contained, to one side, the photocopied autobiographical image of a suspended woman in some sort of garden. Each street artist then responded by painting something he or she wanted to tell the woman about Ghana. Most of the works were made on little tables on the street, with cars whizzing by. When the work was assembled and exhibited at the National Museum, the street artists all came and met each other, mostly for the first time.

What was their feeling about the project ?And did they tell you stories?

In a nutshell, most of the street artists were pleased to be working on a project where a strange foreign woman commissioned them to collaborate, to illustrate something personally important to each of them, whether political, social, or religious. Domestic situations were illustrated, images of real homes or ideal homes, sport events, local shops, life in school, in the hospital, in the bars. Depicted also were the nation’s leaders in significant moments , and the traditional sacred places, such as in Ashanti, where a magic dimension also manifests.

Will you tell me something of the Foundation for Contemporary Art which you helped establish. How was it started?

When we arrived in Accra in 2001 it was very difficult to connect with the art community which appeared fragmented and undefined to a large degree. Over the next few years a conversation developed with artist friends about the need to have a place to network, to learn, to have access to catalogues from outwith Ghana. FCA was registed in 2004 and is now one of the most prominent art organizations in the city, and is part of the identity of young artists in the country. We also had the support of my husband Giancarlo Izzo, who was, at that time, Italian Ambassador, and at the Italian residence we hosted a number of installations and art events to get the foundation ‘on the map’. Recently the great Ghanaian artist present in last years Biennale, El Anatsui, has accepted to become honorary patron. We have an office and library, and approximately one hundred members. Finances for contemporary visual culture is not a priority in Africa, so it is always a struggle, but the dedication of members such as the new director Adwowa Amoa and Ato Annan has strengthened the base. There is a strong group spirit.

Are they mainly painters?

Painters and sculptors mainly, installation artists, some photographers and also musicians.

What materials are used?

Apart from the imported and expensive art materials, there is much re-using, searching for local solutions, recycling of wood, plastic, tin etc. Once I witnessed this in Ghana, I also tended to put away my expensive imported canvas and work with local material, which felt more contextualized and more challenging.

Lastly, your most recent piece, now in April 2008, is called ‘The Black-and-White-Is-One Chair’. Where does this title come from?

The chair’s title is inspired by the artist Kwame Akoto, better known as Almighty God, a reknown painter from Kumasi in Ghana. He has done paintings with that very title of black and white children holding hands. I think the rise of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate in the States, something that is also widely discussed by my friends in Africa made me think of that title, of Almighty’s paintings. I put that together with the idea of the old ‘courting chair’, of relationship to colour, to race, to complimentarity, and had the prototype made here in Umbria . I think of this chair as a ‘safe place’, to go back to Winnicott. As an artist, I am aware of colour – and as a human being, and through the extraordinary experience of living in Africa as a ‘minority’, I am deeply aware of skin colour. A passerby who saw the chair in the workshop said to me, somewhat uncomfortably ‘but what if the two different colours of people, the black and the white, don’t want to talk to each other as they sit on that chair? ‘That’s fine’ I answered, somewhat ‘flooring’ him, ‘once they are seated, they can also be silent, or they can do what the chair was really designed for, centuries ago: they can always hold hands and kiss’.

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Giusy Caroppo INTERVIEW 2007

The female universe,memory,indigineous tradition, the relationship of the intergrated ‘foreigner’ with local population…….these are some aspects of your research.can you briefly describe some recent projects?

1) ‘Castaways’ a ‘multisensorial’ project of 2,000 small collages created form ‘environmental data’ from the shorelines of west africa, with an accompanying sound environment and fim entitled ‘where water touches land’ by sound artist steven feld-a meditation on the atlantic and an exploration of a very significant place in the history of slavery and encounter

2) ‘Topographies of the Dark’-large scale sculptural paintings which then ‘resound’ in the musical improvisations of the African-American jazz group ‘Accra Trane Station’, just released in January 2008, and ‘Exposures-a White Woman in West Africa’-60 images of myself in everyday relationships with the people of Ghana in the period 2002-2005 which has been presented in Italy, America and Australia.

At Muro Leccese for the work ‘INTRANSITU’ you collaborated with a group of women embroiderers, very different in culture,social class and age, and from a small town of peasant extraction: What was their reaction to the proposal and the development of a complex project of contemporary art such as yours?

I worked in a delicate balance between a directive and non directive relationship in such a group project, first of all creating a sense of the culture of the project being a ‘safe place’ and ensuring that the participants, in this case the 15 women from the arakamere embroidery group, feel the power of their skills and that they have authority through this. There was a sense of great collaboration, also thanks to the group organizer, Anna Maria Spano. The women were enthusiastic to partecipate and Interpreted the idea of the installation in very personal terms, which gave the finished opus its ‘soul’.

For the realisation of the work installed in Acaya you involved the sound artist Steven feld.Why do you choose to include sound environments to a work which is already so powerfully visually?

In the last few years I have beome more and more interested in collaborations and the idea of engaging multiple senses.Through this, I have also learnt to ‘hear’ again. In the case of Acaya, the intimacy and authority of the individual women’s voices gave both gravitas and poetry to the visual aspect, and did engage the viewing public on a number of levels.

^^^^

For Samizat blog on the Intransitu project in Edinburgh (2011) click here.