Stories far and near
BY CHARLES ANDERSON
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Arts
David Ryan is a conjurer, a traveller and a faux historian, fascinated by illusion. Charles Anderson reports.
David Ryan's preoccupations make their presence known in his current exhibition at the Catchment Gallery.
''I'm a traveller in the sense that I have the bug. From the early 1970s I went from Europe through Asia on the hippie trail. I'm still doing it, for too damn long, really, but it really affected the way I thought about art.''
The journey, the process of making art, for Ryan, became at least as important as the end product. The idea that to be an artist one needs to be settled in some kind of studio environment to be alone with one's thought and materials does not sit well with Ryan. Portability became a number one priority. He wanted to go to places and make notes and paint on the move. He was inspired by English walking artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. They became eheroes for Ryan, who empathised with the way their works were responses to an environment.
But where Long recorded his journeys by photographing the landscapes he visited in black-and-white with a 35mm camera, Ryan chooses something more historical: a map-maker's pad.
It was given to him ''by some old guy'' who perhaps thought it might come in handy. It did. The pad allows Ryan to travel almost anywhere with a little kit, set up and record what he sees, what he thinks and what he feels. In watercolour paintings, in pencil sketches and notes what he takes down at the time forms the basis of what will become his work when he returns home.
''The bringing together of a show is always about one place or a number of places.'' In the current case it is Southland and India and Malaysia and in countless other countries Ryan has spent his lifetime visiting. But he insists his shows are always the same. ''They are different, but always the same.''
The aspect that always changes is the narrative that each piece tells. They tell of an experience, but also of a history open to interpretation. Many of his works have the look of a museum exhibit as if they are some historical exhibition of miscellaneous ageing paraphernalia. ''It is like a book with the pages missing,'' Ryan says.
Many of the pages are built in fiction. Like his original maps placed in glass cases. ''It is anti-modernist in that despite being contemporary, I am looking back.''
Originally he started using cases as a practical way of moving his work around, but now it is more their formal quality that interests him. ''It's just to create that kind of ambience of an era.''
Originally from Australia, Ryan and his partner Jo moved to Nelson six years ago after she had an intuitive feeling about the place and he had had enough of teaching art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Now, after all their travels, they say they will always call Nelson home.
Ryan likes the idea of working in the materials of the amateur, which is why he chooses watercolours. He also builds models the medium of the toy train enthusiast. Many are ambiguous, like The Listening Post, based on the story of a CIA listening device planted high in the Himalayas in the 1960s to spy on China. They left it there running on nuclear power, but when India finally found out about it the listening post was nowhere to be seen. The fear was that the mountain had swallowed it and nuclear waste would run into the then into the rivers.
For Ryan it is an interesting story that sparked an idea. However, the viewer's interpretation of that story and his piece is what really interests him. He is not into overt meaning, just faint suggestions and feelings.
The feeling that permeates his work is that of illusion, which might be apt seeing his first job as a 14-year-old was as a magician's apprentice. Ryan became interested in conjuring and though he says he was probably a terrible performer, it was the history of magic that interested him.
''I think that has influenced me a lot in the way I think about art, that sense of illusion in my painting and with my models.''
He says he has tried to move away from magic and now just refers to himself as a landscape artist - sort of.
''A landscape artist, but with a narrative.''
- Field Site Archive by David Ryan at the Catchment Gallery in Hardy St until March 6.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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