Veronica Ryan Wins Turner Prize 2022, ‘First in Years Worth Caring About’

Ryan was praised for extending the language of sculpture. She triumphed over fellow nominees Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, and Sin Wai Kin.

Veronica Ryan was awarded the Turner Prize, Britain's most prestigious prize for contemporary art, at a ceremony in Liverpool last night.

Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, who is co-chair of the prize's jury, said Ryan's work 'lends new poetry' to materials that are 'usually overlooked and usually thrown away.'

She was shortlisted for her exhibition Along a Spectrum, which took place at Spike Island in Bristol from 19 May to 5 September 2021.

The show featured forms cast in clay and bronze; sewn, tea-stained and dyed fabrics; and crocheted fishing line pouches filled with seeds, fruit stones, and skins.

Similar forms and materials, which reference Ryan's Caribbean heritage, appeared in her contribution to the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Liverpool, which continues until 19 March 2023. These were displayed on the floor, on shelves, and suspended from crochet bags in a sunglow yellow room.

Ryan is also the creator of delicious giant soursop, breadfruit, and custard apple sculptures made for the Hackney Windrush Art Commission.

Writing for The Independent, Mark Hudson described Ryan's victory as a win for the credibility of the prize after 'a tricky period featuring a collaborative win (2019), a cancellation (2020) and an array of underwhelming creative collectives (2021).'

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones described her as 'a sensational choice', praising her works as more 'meditative and poetic' than those the prize typically rewards.

'This is the first Turner prize in years worth caring about,' he said.

Ryan will receive £25,000 for her win, with the other nominees each receiving £10,000.

Heather Phillipson, who created the ice cream sculpture for the Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth commission, had been favoured to win the prize by bookmakers. She presented a multimedia installation featuring metal insects and wild weather often described as a rave.

Sin Wai Kin exhibited films in which the artist uses makeup, prosthetics, and wigs to portray opera singers, boy band stars, TikTokers, and more. The works question gender binaries and the commodification of queer identities in popular culture.

And Ingrid Pollard showed photographs and signage interrogating the history of racism in the United Kingdom along with kinetic sculptures suggestive of power dynamics, perhaps bowing, perhaps threatening.

Ryan was born in Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean, in 1956, and migrated to Britain with her family as a child. She is the oldest person to win the Turner Prize, but judges and critics praised her work for being of the now.

'I think this is the Turner Prize really recognising that artists can have a breakthrough at any moment in their career,' Helen Legg, director of Tate Liverpool and co-chair of the judging panel, told The Art Newspaper. —[O]