Ann-Maree Reaney
a glimmer of something we know
“…but the bicycle is full of dreams, fast and slow, and the gorilla is full of silence, and here I am, an artist who has promised to put them together.” Dorothea Tanning, 1990.
Mona Ryder has been described as a twenty first century Surrealist by several curators and writers in Australia. This is not a tag she places on herself, preferring her works to be untethered to any linear history of art, however acknowledging the alignment with the movement’s value of the unconventional, the disregarded and the uncanny. This paper will review Mona Ryders studio processes, focusing on artworks that challenge and disrupt gender stereotypes and interrogate power with humour and acidity, power as a dispersed and pervasive practice embodied and enacted, rather than possessed. Ryder is skilfully adept in her ability to pull us in, to affect the beauty and desire of the theatrical in us, to give us glimmers of something we know but just as swiftly to cut us loose.The process of making from kitchen table where everyday materials are skilfully sculpted into extraordinary and engaging forms to the final choreography of these elements in the studio will be discussed.
The focus will be on reviewing installation works as follows : Implements 1992, Les Animaux Sauvage 2005, Head Hunters 2007, and Loose Tongues 2012 as part of the Corporate Body series, as well as other relevant practice.
Les Animaux Sauvage, 2005. National Sculpture Prize, Australian National gallery, Canberra.
Photo Credit: Victoria Garnons-Williams.
Les Animaux Sauvage was selected as part of the National Sculpture Prize exhibition in 2005, held at the National Gallery in Canberra, Australia (NGA). The work has three main components, positioned on opposing walls as though in conversation. Forty-four seductive silk patterned ties in hues of red, have been gutted and reconstructed to render flaccid, semi-erect and phallic forms which are arranged in a grid like pattern on the gallery wall. Ryder cleverly utilizes the male corporate tie as a symbol of power but infuses it with humour, irony and satire. We are reminded of our many dalliances with those ties both in the boardroom, offices and in our social lives. The tie as an integral part of the corporate suit is reminiscent of the flurry of colour, pattern and activity of the animal kingdom in mating season. A slither of colour, a cleavage that conceals the buttons that might be your ‘undoing”. The tie can be a symbol of power and authority displayed on inflated chests to attract or to render the other subordinate, or it can hang low to cover the swelling belly of the well fed or short to increase the demeanour of the height challenged. But importantly the tie is a symbol of male white-collar management. A frontal stripe that can denote the conservative, committed, dependable and responsible, or the dandy, confident risk taker.
Mona Ryder at 22
Les Animaux Sauvage, 2005. National Sculpture Prize, Australian National gallery, Canberra.
Photo Credit: Victoria Garnons-Williams.
Each tie has been carefully selected and for many the limits of its possible form tested through the act of stuffing by the artist. The majority curl from the wall like shiny patterned snakes, some hanging down with shadows making calligraphic forms on the wall. Like protruding tongues that are smooth and silky “metaphoric carriers of the smooth lies that male power ritually dispenses” (4). On closer inspection we see Ryder has stitched woven commercial labels on the back of each tie “Trust me”, “man-made stuffed 100% Pure Guile”. On the opposing wall, large fake fur letters spell out the word PLOT, with the adjoining wall using vinyl letters to spell out words such as skinned, cutthroat, pure guile, posturing. The large fur letters that spell out PLOT lean against the gallery wall like large letter blocks to be moved carefully in the considered tactics of a game of chess. We are invited to consider the complicated and changing positions of power as, accomplice, or fellow conspirator. Les Animaux Sauvage was selected to be part of The Macquarie Bank travelling exhibition.
Les Animaux Sauvage, 2005. Detail of tie labels. National Sculpture Prize, Australian National Gallery, Canberra.
Ryder was invited to give a floor talk at the NGA in which she spoke of her interest in the dynamism of interpersonal relationships and the vital importance of the selection and manipulation of everyday materials utilized in each of her artworks. In this talk Ryder reads excerpts from her poem Lily White, a modern corporate fairytale a precursor to Les Animaux Sauvage. In both her writing and her artmaking we witness her powerful ability as alchemist to transport us from the perceived mundanity of our lived experience to engage us into the investigation and reflection of the evocative, compelling, dangerous and dark worlds we inhabit. Using satire and humour Ryder weaves her seductive plot of corporate bodies with males and females implicated in hideous undertakings and theatrical fictions. Scenes we have all witnessed and at times may have even been unwittingly involved in, even as bystanders.
Studio Work, 2004.
“Lily White’s tongue licked slippery red lips:
In and out it flowed.
Join me, tongues,
Whisper in my dark cave……
Pink tongues twitched with excitement,
Resonating
At the prospect of another’s fall”
Lily White Mona Ryder 2005
Headhunters, 2007. Redeeming the Ruin, Banyule Art Gallery, Victoria. Curated by Wendy Garden.
Headhunters 2007 continues Ryder’s Corporate Body series, an interrogation of power and a theatrical commentary on the machinations and intrigue of human behaviour in management. Ryder makes us laugh at the absurdity of the lined up black leather shoes with erect stuffed silky smooth ties (lies), one pair of shoes with hair peeking out from beneath the white collar. The headhunters charge forth in unison displaying their finest wares with shields and spears and two white collars embroidered with Buck placed above them, like corporate spiritual guardians. In Headhunters as in many of Ryder’s works, the artwork title and the text intimately embroidered, or emblazoned in neon or fur engage us to consider semantic change and the capacity for a word or phrase to have related multiple meanings. Headhunters was selected as part of the touring exhibition Redeeming the ruin…the art of consumption curated by Wendy Garden, Banyule Art Collection, Victoria, Australia.
In the poem Lily White, Ryder writes
“I am a clever, little boy
A naughty little boy
See the glow on my soft pink cheeks
Just another schoolboy trick
What a prick
We’re clever, little boys
Naughty little boys
See the glow on our soft pink cheeks
Stuff your tie,
Curl it at the end.
Let it dangle
How are you my friend”.
Headhunters, 2008. Redeeming the Ruin, Banyule Art Gallery, Victoria.
Photo Credit: Richard Glover.
Loose Tongues, 2012. Exhibited in Rites of Passage, Gympie Regional Art Gallery, 2019. Curator: Meaghan Shelton. Photo Credit: Don Hildred.
February 1st 2021, a team of archaeologists from Egypt and the Dominican Republic discovered the remains of a 2,000-year-old, gold-tongued mummy, an amulet they suggest to enable the deceased to speak “before the Osirian court” in an eloquent manner.(6)
The gold amulet would be placed in the mummy's mouth during a burial ritual.
(Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)
Ryder has been fascinated by human tongues, photographing them and painting and fashioning them in air dryed clay. In Loose Tongues 2012, Ryder plays with the meaty tongue form and the agility of this muscular organ, in later work providing sheaths for them in skin, leather and fabric. The sheath is like a guard or protector but also like a shed skin, leaving no evidence of the contortions of its previous life. In Loose Tongues a snake coils elegantly around a series of contorted clay tongues. The snake/serpent is a universal but complex symbol, representing death and destruction but also fertility, a symbol of rebirth, sexuality, transformation and immortality.
In Christian tradition Satan is represented in the guise of a serpent, a symbol of temptation. The cunning snake that convinces Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, that leads to her expulsion from Eden. In one of the tongue sheaths the garden of Eden is represented. In later tongue artworks we see a cross/crucifix gouged into the muscle of the tongue, fine metal spikes protruding from the tongues surface like an abrasive field and a tongue that is curled back with a screw like projectile placed to curtail its movement or possibly to create the force to launch the incendiary device.
Loose Tongues, 2012. Exhibited in Rites of Passage, Gympie Regional Art Gallery, 2019. Curator: Meaghan Shelton. Photo Credit: Don Hildred.
It is Ryder’s attention to detail of the materiality of forms, that I have witnessed on my many visits to Mona’s table. The dining table laid bare with the carcasses of mussel shells, carefully cleaned after each dinner party, or meters of stockings gutted, stitched and dyed red, or numerous shoes carefully selected for their associations with power and sexuality, fur, leather, skins, hair and treacherous looking beauty implements like eyelash curlers or cooking implements like whisks and graters. Chairs that join to make cradles, crutches that become hair swings, and unsteady and tenuous supports for our lived bodies. The magic, joy and treachery of the fairy tale as played out in our daily lives. The alchemy begins, as Ryder meticulously renders these materials into exquisite sculptural forms, men’s leather Italian shoes have beautiful painted portraits on their soles, high heels are covered in a stocking or skin sheath and have electric plugs attached, creating both an anxiety and a heightened sense of excitement. Skins are painted with exquisite detail, paintings are padded and embroidered, stockings are fashioned into exquisite dog and human heads, and ball gowns and long velvet curtains fall in glorious collapse as they hit the floor. Forms that are engaging yet satirical, tactile yet repelling, highly theatrical and seductive, are cleverly choregraphed in the dance of conversation.
Loose Tongues, 2012. Exhibited in Rites of Passage, Gympie Regional Art Gallery, 2019. Curator: Meaghan Shelton. Photo Credit: Don Hildred.
Over the 30 years I have known Mona Ryder I have very rarely seen her without an idea brewing feverishly in either drawing, creative writing or in the direct materiality of working or choregraphing an installation. She re uses forms and continuously makes new conversations about power, gender, sexuality and mortality and the theatrics and pungent joy and pain of our everyday lives. In the studio she spends endless hours critically adjusting each element. The home and the family are central to Mona Ryder’s life. The long wooden dining table is her domain. Sewing machine positioned on one end and strewn materials charged with meaning waiting impatiently for her attention, laptop in the middle (open and ready for conversing), and piles of art and research books on the other end. The table is then transformed into a lunch or dining table with fine handmade Italian glasses, exquisite food and always great conversation with her many friends considered family.
Portrait of Mona Ryder, 2012. Going Public, Queensland Centre for Photography and Redlands Art Gallery.
Curator: Jaqueline Armistad. Photo Credit: Richard Nolan-Neylan
With a career spanning five decades Mona Ryder is a prolific artist moving with ease between creative writing, printmaking, painting, sculpture, large scale installation and public artworks. Her work has been recognized by many significant art institutions in Australia, however a major retrospective of her work is necessary to highlight this important artist whose artworks explore issues of gender, sexuality, mortality and power.
It is not the silence of the gorilla but in fact the misunderstanding of that silence that Mona Ryder “observes”. She appears to “hear” those dreams, both fast and slow, and in doing so we begin to witness the inbuilt paradox of life itself.
1. https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/163
2. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/surrealism
3. Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison. London, Penguin.
4. Hoffman, I. (2008). A dark and merry dance. Catalogue Cairns Regional Gallery
5. Ryder, M. (2005) National Gallery Floor Talk (date required)
Ann-Maree Reaney
Ann-Maree Reaney is a practicing artist, curator and academic with 35 years’ experience in the visual arts sector both in Australia and overseas. Her work has been exhibited internationally including the Biennale Arte Dolomiti in Italy in 2016.
Academic roles include Head of the School of Visual Arts at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) as well as positions at various Australian universities including Griffith University, QUT and UTAS. Ann-Maree recently retired as Dean of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises (CACE), Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where she played a significant role in negotiating and implementing culturally sensitive change within a growing and innovative art and design sector in the UAE, and building relationships and collaborations with key organizations in government and private sectors in the UAE, Middle East, Europe, and USA.
She has been awarded state, national, and international awards including the DAAD German government scholarship to undertake research in Berlin, and Arts Queensland Grant to undertake research in India and artist-in-residencies in Mornington Island, Paris and Beijing through the Visual Arts Crafts Board of the Australia Council, Arts Queensland and the Cite International des Arts, France. Ann-Maree was a contributing writer for the bilingual book Public Art+Practice: East+West, IS Publishing, Hong Kong.
She has represented the field of education, visual art, design, and universities at board of management and committee level. She has been a guest speaker at universities and art organizations in Singapore, India, France, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, England, and the United Arab Emirates.
Photo Credit: Walter Willems