Cheralyn Ryan: Woven like a carpet

Cheralyn Ryan began her formal studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) as a mature student. Her marriage had ended, leaving her as primary provider for two children, so she planned to study art education and obtain work as an art teacher. As her interest in studio work grew, and her personal circumstances changed, she made a serious commitment to painting fulltime, which has continued unbroken for the past decade. Her first solo exhibition in a Halifax public gallery (since graduating) was titled Knit Like a Sweater (Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, 1995).

  Formally, Ryan's current Carpet Series builds on the neo-expressionist position that she established in Knit Like a Sweater. A shallow pictoral space is activated overall with interconnected forms, saturated colur, and expressive patterning. Thematically, she continues the ecological conerns evident in her earlier works, although the reduced acidity of her colurs suggests that she is less preoccupied with the toxicity of pollution (which these colours represent to her) and more with the rich fecundity of biological existence. Each work acrs as a metaphor for the dual robustness and fragility of the biosphere: dancing forms that conjure microscopic aspects of the chain of life interweave across the surface of these canvases, flickering between flower-forms, snowflakes, cellular structures, and crystalline or fractal images that suggest the mathematical underpinnings of organic growth. 

Excerpt from exhibition essay written by Susan Gibson Garvey.