Bad lemon (lichen)

A deep ambivalence about objects and the human desire to have them runs through the tradition of still life. A seventeenth-century painting of a lavish feast or bouquet celebrates the pleasures of the senses and the satisfactions of worldly ownership. Yet the same painting may also carry within it reminders of mortality and time’s passing: symbols of death and evidence of decay which remind viewers that, no matter how glorious their possessions, they cannot take them beyond this life. This ambivalence has deepened and transformed in the object-glutted twenty-first century, with traditional concerns about the afterlife now replaced by anxieties about hyper-consumption, extraction, privilege, pollution and sustainability. Working with an array of precious stones, sculptor Kathleen Ryan incarnates this ambivalence in objects both alluring and alarming – chief among them gigantic pieces of fruit that are fashioned with lapidary delicacy but which also appear to be rotting before our eyes. Inspired in part by pin-beaded hobbyist fruits that Ryan has collected from American thrift stores, these works also reflect on (and are part of) the traffic in luxury goods that defines the commercial art world. Artworks, Ryan knows, are among the most contradictory consumer objects of our times, and her ‘Bad lemon (lichen)’ manifests these contradictions in an object both dazzling and dismaying. In this allegory on the shelf life of art, the precious can’t be separated from the perishable. Something’s rotten here. Yet who could fail to lean closer in fascination?