Moving between Australia, Europe, Africa, Brazil and Italy, Virginia Ryan has built an artistic practice shaped by displacement, memory, encounter and the question of belonging. Working across photography, painting, sculpture, installation and found materials, she explores the stories carried by objects, places and people.

Her idea of “Biografia Plurale” reflects a life made of overlapping identities, memories and contradictions. In this conversation, Ryan speaks about migration, the Western gaze, collaboration, the poetics of the everyday, and the importance of remaining curious and attentive to what lies beyond the obvious.

1. You have lived between Australia, Europe, Africa and other places, often occupying the position of both insider and outsider. When you look back today, do you think you were searching for a place to belong or learning to live without one?

I think I was learning that belonging doesn’t necessarily have to be attached to one place. I left Australia when I was young and since then I have lived in very different worlds, Egypt, Europe (ex-Yugoslavia during the break-up, then Scotland), West Africa, Brazil and now again Italy. Perhaps I did think I was searching for somewhere to belong; gradually I understood that movement itself was who I became.

I have often been both inside and outside a place. I can feel deeply connected and at the same time be a foreigner. That position can sometimes be uncomfortable, but it has also taught me to look carefully, to listen and not to assume that I understand. I belong to the accumulation of all these places rather than to any single one of them. In fact, the solo show I held this summer in Villa
Sforzesca was subtitled ‘We Are Multitudes’.

2. Much of your work is concerned with migration, displacement, memory and the movement of objects from one place to another. What happens to an object when it leaves the world in which it originally had meaning? Can an object carry a memory that is not your own?

Yes, I think objects carry memory; we feel this. I have always been interested in objects that have had a life, cloth, photographs, shoes, letters, fragments, things found or given to me. When an object moves from one culture or place into another, something is transformed: loss and yet renewal through a new interpretation. Meaning becomes less certain. New associations gather around it. Obviously I am not talking about cultural artefacts or ritual objects being appropriated, just to be clear.

I recognise something of myself in displaced objects. I am interested in what happens when something is removed from its original context, especially if it has been discarded. An object may carry somebody else’s history, and possessing the object doesn’t mean possessing a history.

3. You have described your identity as something mutable, formed by overlapping places, languages and memories. Has art been a way of constructing an identity or accepting that identity can never be entirely fixed?

Both. Art has certainly helped one construct a sense of self, but it has also taught me to distrust the idea that there is one fixed self waiting to be ‘discovered’. Years ago I used the term Biografia Plurale, and I still feel close to that idea. We contain many biographies. There are contradictions, gaps, forgotten things, invented memories, places we have left and places that remain inside us. There are stories about our own childhoods we reconstruct through photographs, for example. I don’t feel a great need anymore to resolve the contradictions. Art gives me somewhere to explore, re-imagine and re-place.

4. Your practice moves freely between photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, installation and found materials. What comes first for you: the idea, the material, the place or the encounter with another person?

There isn’t one answer because it changes from work to work. Sometimes an object begins everything. I see something and immediately feel that it has a possibility beyond its ordinary function. Sometimes it is a place. Sometimes it is a conversation or an encounter with another person. A walk. And sometimes an idea stays with me for years before surfacing. I am interested in finding the form that the work needs. Quite often I don’t know what I am doing as a process begins. That uncertainty is important to me. It implies risk, as does living.

5. Africa has profoundly shaped your artistic practice, but your work also questions the Western gaze. After so many years of living and working in West Africa, what did you begin to see differently about Europe and perhaps about yourself?

Living in Africa altered the way I looked at Europe, but it also made me much more conscious of my own position as a European, white, ‘western’ person. Our view is limited, informed by our context. Things that appear ‘universal’ from a Eurocentric position are often not. My years in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire were important as I lived there, worked there, formed friendships and collaborated with artists and communities. In Ghana I was involved in establishing the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and that taught me an enormous amount about exchange, responsibility and the importance of creating structures with people rather than arriving with predetermined ideas. Africa also made me aware of how easily Western representations can simplify people and places. I became increasingly suspicious of the exotic, the picturesque and of the authority of the person behind the camera. It taught me to question my own gaze.

6. You have repeatedly invited other people into your work: migrants, women, artists, communities, anthropologists, musicians. Where do you draw the boundary between making art about people and making art with people?

This is something I have thought about for many years. There is always a question of agency when working ‘relationally’, particularly when there are differences of nationality, economic situation, race, gender or social position. For me, collaboration has to involve some form of genuine exchange. That doesn’t mean that every collaboration is equal in some perfect sense. Life isn’t like that. But I think one must remain conscious of relationships and monitor dynamics. Some of the projects that matter most to me could not have existed without other people’s participation! At a certain point the work becomes something that exists ‘between’ us.

7. Your work often transforms things that appear ordinary, discarded or overlooked: fabrics, photographs, shoes, posters, everyday objects. What is it that makes you stop and look at something that others might simply pass by?

There is often a moment of recognition. An object seems charged. I have always liked things that already carry traces of use. A worn object has had another existence before it reaches me. It has been touched, carried, abandoned, loved, ignored. Often the humblest material can hold deep memory. I am interested in the poetics of the everyday, rather than in the sublime.

8. You trained as an art therapist and later in Gestalt counselling. How has this experience changed the way you understand the relationship between making an image and encountering another human being? And where, for you, does therapy end and art begin?

My training in art therapy and Gestalt counselling changed the way I observe with all senses, particularly listening. It also made me more attentive to what happens between people, silence, hesitation, gesture, what is said and what isn’t said. It taught me that an image doesn’t necessarily need to be explained. Sometimes an image embodies something beyond the spoken word. That is true in art therapy, and I think it is also true in art. However, I make a clear distinction between therapy and art. I don’t believe art has to ‘heal’ nor do I make therapeutic claims for my artwork. Art can disturb, confuse, provoke, seduce or none of these. Therapy has a different responsibility. What they share, for me, is attention: the willingness to stay with something.

9. Your work seems to resist the idea of a single, stable narrative. You speak of biography as something containing gaps, contradictions and “counter-narratives.” Do you believe that an artwork can sometimes tell us more through what it refuses to explain than through what it reveals?

Very much so. I like leaving space in the work for the viewer. I don’t want to close every door by ‘explaining’ what everything means. Sometimes what isn’t shown is exactly what gives an artwork an emotional force.

10. After more than four decades of making art across continents, what still surprises you in the studio? And if the younger Virginia Ryan could enter your studio today, what do you think she would recognise and what would she no longer understand?

I am both the same person, and not at all. Curiosity remains, as does a vital drive to make.

11. Red wine or beer and where would you rather drink it: in a crowded bar, around a long table with friends, or somewhere completely alone?

White wine! Definitely around a long table with friends. Food, conversation, people talking intimately then over one another, somebody arriving late, somebody staying too long. That kind of table. I love the time after a dinner at my house, re-creating order, listening to jazz.

12. If you could sit across the table from a young artist at the very beginning of their journey, what would you tell them not about success, but about staying true to the work?

Don’t wait to feel inspired and don’t spend too much time looking sideways at what everybody else is doing. Look at art, but also look at everything that isn’t called art. Talk to people outside your own world. Pay attention. Accept that there will be long periods when nobody is particularly interested in what you’re doing. Those periods can actually be very important. Don’t construct your work around what you imagine the art world wants from you. There is no singular ‘artworld’: there are ‘art-worlds’: find the one for you.

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