Résumé - Links - Student Work - Contact
What 'Ya Got There Uncle Jude?
Acrylic and conte crayon on wood panel
35"x 35"
People Are Just People [But You Felt Like Home](#1)
Watercolor on cut and sewn paper. displayed on wall with pins
approximately 42"x 36"
Feel free to look through Kathleen Ryan's portfolio for a sample of her work. If you have any questions, please contact her.
KATHLEEN RYAN
About The Artist
Kathleen Ryan was born in Santa Clara, California but grew up mostly in NW Ohio and now resides in Washington. Ryan received her BFA in Painting from Ball State University in 2010 and her MFA [interdisciplinary focus] in 2014, at Washington State University. Though still in the beginning of her career, Ryan has been exhibiting work in a variety of public, juried, and invitational exhibitions for over ten years throughout the U.S.
Perhaps a learned habit from a prolonged hearing loss until the age of four, Ryan's art has always been a way to observe, collect, and process her surroundings and relationships to it. Experimenting through layers, space, texture, line, color, process, and materials, Ryan revisits and investigates accumulated memories, places, and people.
While in undergrad Ryan began exploring one of the cultural universals in Anthropology: 'Home'. Her work focuses on understanding Home as: man-made structures, people [our social relationships], and home as ones self; the human body. The issues she explores are those such as the relationships between people and their environmental surroundings, the different types of social relationships we have with others, and the growth of oneself as we cycle through these homes or social stages of life. For Ryan the idea of home implies the act of building something. The idea that we build our lives or carve away and define it is intriguing; it is a debate on our control versus our lack of control of the elements that construct our life and the construction of one's identity.
Intrigued by the morphing landscapes and spaces of the cross-country move the the PNW, Ryan's current bodies of work use a variety of media [sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, painting, fiber arts, video art and writing] to investigate nature in relationship to her interest of home. Experimenting with materials and new media Ryan is interested in how one experiences a space and how that place connects to our body physically, emotionally and mentally through our brains construction of body or mental maps. Similar perhaps to how, through repetition of mark making, the hands can learn a process with the materials and operate [think] with their own brain, leaving the mind free to wander or fall into a state of meditation during the creative process.
