As a child, she remembers making wire jewellery with her sister. In the exhibition at Lakeside Arts, sculptures and drawings in wire are exhibited alongside figures in bronze, plaster and resin, as well as large-scale charcoal and pencil drawings.
Central to her work are images of the ladyhare (half-woman, half-hare), the minotaur and various animal companions like the boar, horse, and dogs (based on Ryder’s own part-whippet, part-Italian greyhound pets). What you’ll notice first about these sculpted creatures is the lively surface textures of the bronze rather than any attempt to recreate the realistic appearance of fur. This is due to the fact that the bronze figures are cast from the artist’s original models made in plaster.
Robber, 1988
Ryder loves to exploit the rough and messy texture of plaster, scraping and chiselling away at the material once it’s hardened. As the plaster dries, she presses in the found objects you can see in the exhibition – cogs, toy dinosaurs, and phones to name but a few. This not only adds a level of fun to the sculptures (we challenge you to find all the embedded objects!) but also a visually enticing combination of the natural and the manmade.
Some of her most striking pieces are made from wire, which has been galvanised (coated in a protective layer of zinc to prevent rusting) for showing outdoors where her works feel very at home. One of her large wire pieces can still be seen at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park today. In the Djanogly Gallery, you can also see her intricate wire drawings of dog paws, a hand and a kneeling ladyhare.
Open Hand II, 2008
When Ryder works with wire, it is a very physical process, using her hands, pliers, and her full body force to bend and create pieces of all shapes and sizes – this laborious process has removed all fingerprints from her fingers over the years! This physicality can be felt in the works. Ryder has said that with wire, “the trick is to produce a final piece which looks spontaneous so that when it is placed in the landscape it looks like the stroke of a brush on a canvas”.
SOPHIE RYDER: SCULPTURE, DRAWINGS, PRINTS
Saturday 19 November – Sunday 12 March
Open Tuesday-Saturday 10am-4pm
Sunday 12noon-4pm
Djanogly Gallery
Admission Free
find out more