Victoria Boulter Groening

not my mother but my other

I have been nurtured by Mona Ryder, but she is not my mother. Mona Ryder was born in October 1945, as was my mother. If my mother is sun, Mona is moon. I have often felt threads and overlaps between me and Mona.  I met her in the mid-eighties when at 17 I attended QUT to study Visual Art. Here I was moulded into a painter by the Ray Hughes’ stable of artists that dominated the lecturing staff. Mona Ryder was not one of this stable.

 Mona nurtured us and created beautiful artworks of life expanding into the air floating around, an energetic and humming swirl of breath and vitality. Life is messy and Mona’s works reflected the buzzing frenzy of life filled with memory, family, thoughts and dreams. She took domestic objects and started unravelling stories, embedding familiar objects with strong emotion, an embodiment of experience. Ironing boards became figures caught in a visceral moment. Her artwork was wonderous and exposed the mundane as the marvellous just waiting to be revealed.

In my memory, rightly or wrongly remembered, Mona was relegated to printmaking. The printmaking department was somewhere below the upstairs studios. The upstairs studios were dominated by the, mostly male, Ray Hughes stable. I sensed that she lay outside this stable. This was no reflection on Mona’s artworks, but on the dominance of certain ideas that pervaded the college confining artists to a studio and marrying them to a practice that could be easily measured, labelled and interpreted. Mona could not be confined. She printed, yes, but also drew, painted, sculpted, created installations, an artist with a capital A. Her artwork was like a burst, a flash, a flare; hot and messy, but intricate and beautiful. In the works of this time the organic stretched into space and spaces with soft energy that searched out light and air, or cool and dark. There were stories told in non-linear ways and metaphors made with objects and imagery. Her figures were elongated and fine, soft and hard, rigid and flexible. Mona placed herself in some of these stories, but the stories were not an autobiography, more an anthology; a bricoleur’s collection artfully assembled from life’s detritus. Her exhibition, Passing on, Michael Milburn Galleries, 1987 encapsulated the approaches Mona Ryder’s work took in this decade.

Hindsight is a wonderous thing and now I look back at Mona’s artworks from this time, recognising the language she was honing from shells, figures, drapery, object, red, thread, velvet. I was too young to recognise this language. In the 80’s I was caught up in my own search for a dialect, hampered by an adolescent mind and sensibility. Mona did glimmer though, a soft moonlight and then she moved interstate and the light stopped at least for me at this time.

Part 2: The moon shines on a life raft

Almost 10 years after first meeting Mona Ryder I reconnected with her when we were both students at QCA. Mona was established and recognised through exhibitions and residencies. Her art was articulate and poetic, I still felt immature in my language, my own voice had not yet formed, and I scrabbled to make meaning. Mona’s art still hummed, but the tune was even more layered, like a chorus or an orchestra, each part gave depth and resonance to the singing of her work.

Then Mona Ryder and I came together to make an artwork. We were paired, Mona Ryder, an established female artist paired with me, an emerging female artist, in a show called XX. The multiplication of two, the experience of female, the collaboration of women as makers resulted in an exhibition that articulated experiences across generations of women artists.

The making of our collaborative artwork offered moments when Mona Ryder and I would meet for a few hours each week and stitch and talk, talk and stitch. This was the smallest of sewing circles and I learnt so much in the process of making and collaborating. It was a gentle process of to and fro, tidal, like our conversations. She was a sublime mentor to me, the emergent artist. Although a collaboration, echoes of Mona’s practice were embedded in this artwork: the connection to water, the rich redness of materials, the relationship between interiors and exteriors, the drama of the installation, the connection to fabric and material, the stitch, echoes of the absent body, the emotive poetry of the object.

Mona’s confident control of language meant that she not only understood the making, but the installation of the work and our conversations helped me become more articulate and married our practice, so the elements of our work seamlessly stitched together. We both worked with fabric, stitching and domestic objects. We both referenced the body and the abject. Mona mentored me to a more articulate use of visual language and craft and her generosity made me feel as though I was not voiceless, but part of this dialogue, this poetic vision. SS Lingo lingers in this time, hovering sublimely under a false moon.

Part 3. Debris and memorial: the midden of a lifetime’s meals.

The mussel shells; pearly interiors, lustrous and iridescent and dark matte exteriors. This debris of dinners and shared meals that Mona Ryder treasures, the skeletons from soft muscled creatures. Shells are collected in their hundreds to be transformed by her, an alchemist making gold from stone. I would visit Mona Ryder some afternoons and see her dinner table, the site of many meals, adorned by her sewing machine, pearly headed pins and fabrics, lustrous red satin rivers or black swathes. Mona would beckon me to the studio to see the recent work and show me her handiwork, carefully stitched shrouds of mussel shells, stuffed ties or soft interiors for hard leather shoes.

Mona Ryder’s work surrounding her in its making, and I remember her telling me of how the large components of Mother, Other, Lover (1995), lay up her hallway before installing them in the Queensland Art Gallery water mall. A cup of tea was usually proffered, and we would sip and talk about life and the work, the ever-present work.

Life is messy and it is often the mess or debris that Mona Ryder reconfigures. The possibility of the discarded has long been part of Mona’s practice, at times the wooden ironing board or wooden crutches, shoes not worn, chairs and turned wooden legs, mussel shells that are the midden of shared meals. Mona Ryder treats the discarded with the reverence of a holy relic. Her adornment reminds me of Mohammad’s heavily adorned beard hair or the toe bone of John the Baptist, both holy relics held in the Topkapi Palace, Istanbul.

The sacred would seem mundane without the reverent treatment of the artisan. So, Mona treats the mundane with reverence to form her own reliquary. In some artworks her lapsed Catholicism is redirected to form grottoes, shrouds and sacred relics. This is how Mona Ryder becomes the alchemist and poet at once. The lyricism of the mundane released through stitching, assembling, adorning, reforming. These objects form stories and take on a sublime significance, taking on the burden of emotion and experiences worn into their materiality.

The mussel shells became embedded in installations and objects, Mona Ryder is obsessive in her making. Work is always on the go and I remember conversations about a show which was developed, but not shown. The exhibition in development was of reliquaries and coffin shrouds Stairway to Heaven made in about 2014. The black shrouds bulged with the adorning mussel shells, like misshapen beads or jewels, the black of the works embodied a void, like the sea of space. The works were at once rich and sombre. Works were woven with the abject objects of nature, the things that are shed: shells, feathers, hair. The rigid forms alluded to boxes reflecting the fleetingness of life and the residue of memory, a place where the precious are kept. There was painstaking work to stitch and form. Mona refines her work constantly and this unseen story, Stairway to heaven, that was designed with a soundscape did not find a public audience, but I felt privileged to visit while the work was being formed and refined.

Shrouds lay on the dining table while they were worked on, like the laying out of the body on the dining table in the front room of Victorian homes over a century ago. The dining table is the place where we celebrate together the messiness of life and is often the place that Mona Ryder works. Her dining table is emblematic of her life shared with family, with friends, with colleagues.

Part 4. Communion with Mona; the shared cup

Mona Ryder is generous. She will open her home, give of her time and always encourage those around her. She will often tell me “You should make more work.” She encourages me to write too. Her comments are unselfish and not only directed to me; she still nurtures. To visit Mona Ryder is the be offered sustenance, a meal for the soul, not just the body. You will always share a cuppa and conversation. Her work is often in the making at the dining table. This is because life and art slip between each other, thoughts and ideas occur always. Mona Ryder is honest in her language, it is made up of carefully articulated works, sometimes soft undulating magentas of dyed stocking, bicycle inner tubes, looping threads and careful and artful embroidery. There are paintings adorning assembled objects and over time Mona’s language has become more and more refined and skilled, more and more poetic.

She nurtures those around her, and she deserves a wider audience than she has. Mona Ryder is one Australia’s great artist, one with a capital A. The spotlight has danced around her, she has moved into the bright light at times, but as an established artist she needs the light to shine brightly onto her, the sun beating on to the surface of the moon. A moon that sheds light onto those around her.