BIO

Caroline Ryan (b. 2000) is a visual artist, musician, and teacher based between Ridgewood, Queens and the mid-Hudson Valley. 

Her visual practice is largely self-taught and spans painting, fiber work, and sculpture. She works in layers of embedded textiles, plaster, embroidery, metallic leaf, impasto, and found materials to build surfaces of significant physical depth and texture. Her work is attentive to how setting, light, and space alter the compositional and atmospheric experience of a piece. 

She is currently accepting commissions and is selling original works. 

You can learn more about her work as a violinist and teacher here.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I work by hand to build surfaces in layers, pulled tight in places and left loose in others, bunched in large tangles and left plainly flat woven. Burlap, plaster, embroidery thread, fiber, and found objects come together not as decoration, but as the structural foundation for my work. I am interested in the physical behavior of these materials, their densities, their tensions, and the ways they catch, absorb, and expel light.

I'm drawn to designing my pieces beyond the flat plane. A woven surface can be dense and closed in one place, pulled apart and open in another. The tension between what is tightly bound and what is coming undone is often both the subject and compositional basis of my work. Serenity and chaos rarely arrive separately; they are more often woven into the same piece.

I am drawn to the ordinary scenic and textural wonders of the natural world: rivers, growth, erosion, botany, and weather – and to the cycles of accumulation, transformation, light, and decay that shape them. I am interested in how opposing conditions can exist simultaneously: growth alongside decay, density alongside openness, order alongside disruption. My pieces remain within that tension, without needing to resolve it.