Veronica Ryan on the Turner Prize: ‘At 66, not winning would have been very difficult’
Hettie Judah, inews
January 2023
In October 2021, I watched Veronica Ryan unveil a cluster of sculptures on a busy pedestrian site in Hackney. Custard Apple (Annonaceae), Breadfruit (Moraceae) and Soursop (Annonaceae) are the first permanent public monuments honouring the Windrush generation and its contribution to British life and culture.
Within minutes, Ryan’s outsized fruits in bronze and marble – arranged like boulders in a Japanese garden – had been subsumed into the life of the street, props for children’s play and adult conversations alike. At the time, I wrote that Ryan’s beautiful, allusive, engaging work delivered an elegant lesson in how to do public sculpture well. […]