Veronica Ryan, who participated in the Whitney Biennial earlier this year, has added the largest art award in the U.K. to her list of achievements. Sculptor Veronica Ryan has been named the winner of the Turner Prize 2022, worth £25,000 ($30,500), for her work, which honors the Windrush generation and explores the COVID pandemic.
Sin Wai Kin, Ingrid Pollard, and Heather Phillipson, the other artists who made the shortlist, will each receive £10,000 ($12,200). The works of these artists are all currently on display at Tate Liverpool in a show.
The Turner Prize, an honor that frequently sparks debate in the U.K. and elsewhere, hasn’t had just one winner since 2018; that changed this year. All four nominees were successful in 2019, but grants were given instead of the award in 2020, and Array Collective became the first artist collective to win the award in 2021.
Veronica frequently experiments with scale in her sculptures, enlarging everyday materials like seeds or fruit well beyond their natural size. Ryan’s illustrations of them are minutely detailed and strangely realistic despite their extraordinary size.
Born in Montserrat and based in London and New York, Veronica has used her work to consider how trauma is passed down through families and how people and ideas travel. She described memory as “a kind of stained history” in the Whitney Biennial catalog, and she incorporated this idea into her work by using unusual materials like tea. Although the overall themes of her work can seem simple, the things she creates defy straightforward interpretation.
Veronica received a commission to design a monument honoring the Windrush Generation for London in 2021. The final product included mammoth renditions of Caribbean fruits like custard apples, breadfruit, and soursop.
Veronica’s “noticeable shift in her use of space, color, and scale both in the gallery and civic spaces” was praised by the Turner Prize jury. After Lubaina Himid was awarded the Turner Prize in 2017, Veronica is the second black woman to ever receive the honor in its 38-year history. As it happens, Himid included Ryan’s creation in the critical 1983 exhibition “Black Women Time Now.”