Veronica Ryan and the Freedom of Fragile Materials
Lou Stoppard, Frieze
March 2026
It was New York in the 1990s. The artist Veronica Ryan had only recently arrived from the UK and had swiftly had two children. She had barely any money, and any she did have went on the girls. Ryan was used to persisting, making work even if the circumstances – time, finances, space, the attention or enthusiasm of others – made it near impossible. So, moved by the simultaneous exhaustion and essential resourcefulness of motherhood, she did what she had always done, and made work from what she could find, often discarded on the street: wire wool, Jiffy bags, avocado boxes. She liked how the latter looked when they were stacked: a mille-feuille of cardboard, the ridged forms slotting neatly into each other. ‘There’s a moment where they’re stable, and then if it gets to a certain point, they’re suddenly not stable anymore,’ Ryan tells me, over tea. […]