Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations
Whitechapel Gallery, London
01 Apr – 14 Jun 2026
The Whitechapel Gallery is presenting Multiple Conversations, a major survey of Veronica Ryan’s work spanning four decades. The exhibition unfolds in reverse chronology: visitors encounter Ryan’s most recent works on the ground floor before moving upwards through earlier periods, culminating with sculptures and works on paper from the 1980s.
The decision initially feels counterintuitive, particularly as some of the most emotionally resonant works are found in the upper galleries. Yet the curatorial logic clarifies as the exhibition progresses. By introducing Ryan’s mature visual language first, it allows the recurring concerns of her practice to emerge gradually across different materials and forms.
Across four decades, she repeatedly returns to ideas of protection, vulnerability and care through acts of wrapping, folding, gathering and transformation. These gestures create a visual language through which emotional and psychological experience finds material form.
Born in Montserrat and raised in London, Ryan has developed a practice shaped by questions of migration, belonging, inheritance and cultural memory, drawing on influences from Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois to Barbara Hepworth, as well as the knitting and crochet techniques passed down by her mother.
The ground floor introduces recent sculptures: crocheted forms hanging from tall structures and concealing drift seeds and found materials within their stretched surfaces. Developed from observations of fishing nets during a residency in St Ives, these works connect environmental concerns with personal histories of reuse and care. Running along one wall, a long shelf of small-scale works from the Multiple Conversations series uses commodities such as tea, oranges and vanilla to evoke hidden legacies of colonial trade, while seeds carried across oceans suggest migration, displacement and renewal.
What is most compelling, however, is not the symbolic weight of these materials but what Ryan does to them. The wrapping, binding, stitching and gathering that recur throughout the exhibition evoke repair and protection, turning humble objects into forms that remain open to multiple readings. This impulse is partly rooted in loss: Ryan’s engagement with her birthplace of Montserrat, including a series of gouache and pastel drawings depicting the aftermath of the devastating Soufrière Hills volcanic eruption in the 1990s, clarifies why protection and vulnerability are not merely aesthetic concerns but lived ones.
Particularly striking are the collages incorporating family photographs obscured by dense black forms, among them Disavowal (She follows you around) (2002), made during a residency at Yaddo, New York. The concealment of faces creates a sense of absence and unease, suggesting memories that resist narration and mirroring, in two dimensions, the wrapping logic of the sculptures. The psychological intensity here is considerable. Nearby, quilts, cushions and pillows extend Ryan’s preoccupation with shelter and comfort, domestic objects transformed into carriers of emotional meaning. Territorial (1986) deepens this: made from the woollen blankets that many households were discarding in favour of modern duvets at the time, it suggests rest, convalescence and neglect simultaneously.
While the exhibition addresses migration, colonial histories, ecology and inheritance, its greatest strength lies in its ability to transform psychological states into physical form. Across four decades of work, Ryan reveals an extraordinary capacity to make the invisible tangible, allowing memory, resilience and care to inhabit the materials themselves.
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