Veronica Ryan (born in Plymouth, Montserrat, in 1956) is a British sculptor of Caribbean origin. She moved to the United Kingdom as a child in the 1950s and today divides her time between New York and Bristol. In 2022 she won the Turner Prize for what the jury described as her personal and poetic way of expanding the language of sculpture.
Ryan studied at several British art schools, including the Bath Academy of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, and later completed a master's degree in Art History at SOAS. From the outset she moved away from the British modernism taught at the time, turning instead to sculptors such as Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and Barbara Hepworth. A Slade travel scholarship took her to Nigeria, where she became interested in the reworking of everyday objects and ephemeral materials in spiritual offerings and shrines.
In the 1980s she showed in exhibitions linked to the British Black Art movement, such as The Thin Black Line and From Two Worlds, although she insisted that her work should not be reduced to questions of race. Her materials range from cement and bronze to paper, dust and feathers, and her forms recall pods, shells and seeds. Works such as Relics in the Pillow of Dreams (1985) show this aesthetic.
Among her recent projects is a group of three Caribbean fruit sculptures in bronze and marble, installed permanently in Hackney in 2021 as a memorial to the Windrush generation, which won the 2022 Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture. Her work is held in collections including Tate and The Henry Moore Collection, and her concern with origin, memory and the place of women in society has made her a significant figure in contemporary British sculpture.