Christine Morrow

a shaman and a showman

Mona Ryder is a shaman and a showman, performing ritual and symbolic transformations of concrete matter, opening communication channels between the physical and spiritual realms and simultaneously producing animated and immersive spectacles that flaunt the mad and urgent pleasure of living.

Shaman, Mona Ryder, honours her ancestors,  Meret Oppenheim, Frida Kahlo, and Rebecca Horn. Like any good shaman, Ryder employs totems and fetishes, emblems and ex-votos, traverse different sects though; ‘primitive’ religions, cargo cults, and Roman Catholicism.

Ryder’s sculptural practice relies on repurposing existing objects and in her hands, they are treated like fetishes, the name given to seemingly inanimate entities that are permeated and ‘animated’ by spirits. Outside anthropology, the fetishes people most likely refer to are sexual ones: non-genital objects that create sexual excitement, often taking the form of clothing, shoes, and cloth. Typically, these are rubber, leather, and soft-textured fabric. Sexualised fetishes abound in Ryder’s work—stockings and shoes, especially.

But non-sexual fetishes are equally present. Mona’s raw materials are often domestic bric-a-brac, furnishings, implements and decor. In her transformations they retain a patina of age, and a memory of their past lives. Ryder reveres discarded objects, regarding that whoever touched them through domestic ritual left a trace of themselves behind. This idea that an object retains a memory is familiar to us. Like a psychic medium touching a piece of clothing from a missing person, to read their current whereabouts through resonances and residues in the cloth, Ryder transforms found objects in her assemblages, knowing that she is importing, reshaping, and redeploying the human essences that occupy them.

Even the humble mussel shells she scrubs clean and arranges on platters or shields are funerary tombs for the molluscs that once made and tenanted them. In 2012-2013 Stairway to Heaven (not exhibited) one coffin was embellished all over with mussel shells, as spectacular memorial, and embodiment of loss, at once luscious and morbid.

While parallels exist between elements of Ryder’s work and features of ‘primitive religion’ it is not that she borrows styles or motifs from other cultures. similarities rely on the principle that making art is always an act of faith that the will and skill of an artist, when applied to matter can produce a magical or reified object that embodies powerful, immaterial meanings and forces, the supernatural, the miraculous.

Ryder’s work is riddled with oppositions and contradictions, in their forms and materials some works represent earthliness, animal embodiment, mortality, and decay. In the exhibitions Lone Star [2019] and Fragile Gardens [2021], Ryder joined together two timber tall-back chairs and inserted a curved base. The overall effect was that of a coffin or bassinette, referencing the beginning and the end of life.  Through its resolute horizontality it insists that at birth and death the human body is frail and in need of underpinning.

The red colour that appears constantly in Mona Ryder’s work alludes to heat and carnal desire, while its major symbolism is that of blood and viscera. Ryder’s swathes of red stockings and curtains of red velvet are allegories for cascading blood. Blood signifies differently for women and men. By convention, man spills blood through injury, violence, and death. For woman, blood is menstruation, birth, and afterbirth; a woman spills blood for life pulse, and for power.

Ryder also employs tubular and hollow three-dimensional forms that mimic meaty organs: bladders, wombs, placentas, arteries, umbilical cords, ligatures, tongues, and heart-chambers. In the installation Lures at Noosa Regional Gallery [1995], she suspended big red organic shapes made from hide dyed red. They appeared like livers or spleens. One of the hollow red forms suspended above the Water Mall at the Queensland Art Gallery in the Ryder’s major exhibition Mother, Other lover [1995] is transected by combs making it appear like a toothy, flesh-eating organ; a Venus Fly Trap, only made from meat and sinew. Even Mona’s accretions of mussel shells proliferate like virulent growths and clusters.

Alongside her ancient religious motifs of fetishes, totems, talismans, and sentinels are evocations of Roman Catholicism. In her exhibition Dance me to the End of the Night [2016] at Murray Art Museum, Albury, milagros are tied around perfume bottle necks. Milagro is the Spanish word for miracle and denotes the Latin American folk-symbols or ex-votos offered at shrines to acknowledge a saint’s intercession, or alternatively carried around for blessing and protection. They are small bas-relief objects—made from various materials including silver or beaten tin and adopt simple emblems including flaming hearts, crowns, wings, animals, the sun, or human limbs—that encrypt references to the type of holy protection or intercession sought.

Elsewhere, Ryder’s Catholic references are far less overt, softly whispering up: holy and baptismal water; the crutches that hang like stalactites in the shrine of Lourdes; the crucifixion; the wounds of Christ’s stigmata; the white cloths of the altar; and the meal that is the Catholic Mass. She interweaves ancient and modern religious symbols, not unlike what manifests in the syncretism of Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santería, wherein Roman Catholic saints are fused with Yoruba and other West African deities. It is possible that many of Ryder’s Catholic references are not deliberate or conscious. However, Ryder is an artist whose work is personal, contains elements of biography, and draws heavily on her life experience; these symbols work their way in to her practice fluidly and instinctively. In Ryder’s hands, the Catholic references are neither devotional nor sacrilegious. Instead, Catholicism is a simple corollary of art’s mysterious power: founded on belief, ritual behaviour, authority, and magic. Besides, the history of art in the West cannot be understood outside of the history of the Roman and Orthodox churches.

Crutches are a powerful symbol in Ryder’s artwork, and one of her signature materials. She has repeatedly reused and reworked these objects over several decades and always finds new ways to treat them without exhausting their formal and conceptual possibilities. They appear as props and supports, structural frames and weapons. In their accumulation and proliferation throughout Mona’s practice, they remind the viewer of the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, where pilgrims leave behind walking sticks, crutches, and wheelchairs as a sign of miraculous healing. Crutches symbolise the body’s fragility and weakness, but when they are jettisoned, they may represent a damaged body restored to health, miraculously or otherwise.

Ryder’s Hanging Sculpture [1984] depicts a figure surrounded by a network of spear-forms, seemingly also referencing the crucifixion. In another work from the exhibition Hook Line and Sinker [2009], Ryder displayed two crutches affixed at right angles, embodying a Christian cross. Embellished by red fishhooks, it evoked the flesh punctures of Christ’s crucifixion. In Mother, Other lover [1995] installed in the Water Mall at the Queensland Art Gallery a totem-like four-metre-high sculpture with a gape in the centre of red ‘flesh’ may refer to Christ’s stigmata, the name given to the open wounds in each palm that, according to the Bible’s Gospel of John, testify to his crucifixion and prove to doubting disciple, Thomas, that Christ arose from the dead. This theme is again suggested by the sculpture Hand and Hair [2014], depicting a lock of hair suspended from an open palm.

The Roman Catholic Mass is a ritual celebration of Christ’s bodily sacrifice and based on the transubstantiation of wine and unleavened wafers of bread into his blood and body through the act of consecration. Ryder’s handling of this theme is humble and avoids sacrilege. She has made multiple works using bread. It is toasted, crumbed, and portioned into tiny acrylic boxes that give the crumbs the aura of precious morsels.  In Lone Star (2018-2019) at Artisan she displayed these boxes in relation to many works made from cleaned mussel shells. Together, these evoke the loaves and fishes from the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. In Ryder’s hands, art is bodily, spiritual, and psychological nourishment.

Ryder’s work includes constant references to the social role of a woman as that of a domestic automaton. While it is partly true that her use of domestic objects references the comforting familiarity of private life and daily ritual, they simultaneously express frustration with the monotony of domestic chores and the tedious, stifling ennui of suburban domestic entrapment.

There are constant references to feminine stereotypes in Mona’s work. The exhibition titled Mother, Other lover [1995] names the subject explicitly. I think Mona’s art works rage and revolt against the cult of the Virgin Mary, somebody who has no character, will or personality of her own. She is a passive, uncomplaining vessel whose function is absorb her fate and vicissitudes, obey her earthly husband and supply bodily and spiritual service to a father-god and a son-god.  The Virgin Mary is an invisible placeholder in the stories of men.

In Ryder’s practice, women’s domestic, childbirth and childrearing duties are referred to but so are all the qualities that the figure of the Virgin Mary excises from womanhood: her sexual nature, fecund animal body, autonomy, intellect, and powerful artistic creativity. Symbolically, Mona’s ‘Mother’ is less Madonna than Medea—the sorceress and priestess who murdered her children in Euripides’ play of the same name. Medea provides a balance to the saccharine myth of blissful, fulfilled, uncomplaining motherhood. One of Ryder’s works Tattooed Land [2020] featuring a limbless torso even recalls Goya’s painting of Saturn Devouring his Son [1819-23].

So, do not be fooled into thinking the Christian references in Ryder’s work are tame. Catholic martyrs are often portrayed with symbols of how they met their violent deaths. For example, Saint Bartholomew (Bar Talmai) died by having his skin flayed from his body. When he is portrayed, he is often shown draped within his own skin, flayed in a single, continuous piece, and worn loosely like a cloak—or else he is holding it out in his hand, proffering it to the viewer. Proof that the Catholic church has a sense of humour, Bart is the patron saint of tanners. Ryder repeatedly uses hair and skin in her work. Perhaps an echo of Saint Bartholomew in the cascades of red stockings that have repeatedly appeared in Ryder’s practice over the last decade, where they hint at rivers of blood or flayed skin.

Similarly, the appearance of weapons and restraints and the symbols of discipline and punishment in Ryder’s work hints at darker themes. Many of her sculptures feature whips, snares, hooks, barbs, spears, and blades. The Lures series [1995] depict what we interpret as instruments of cruelty. Mona’s incorporation of weapons and evocation of torture is perhaps a nod to the fire and brimstone punishments of the Old Testament or the Book of Revelation, wherein two of the four horsemen brandish a sword and a bow, respectively.

As well as drawing interpretations from ‘primitive’ and Roman Catholic religion to shed light on her work, I think Ryder’s practice rewards being read in terms of cargo cults, hybrid spiritual behaviours that flourished after World War II in Melanesian-island nations. Cargo cults are seen as an instance of syncretism because of the way that they reconcile different religious frameworks, including Christian and Indigenous ones. The correspondence between these and Ryder’s work is that many of her sculptures and installations feature assemblages that are part culinary device, part weapon and part fetish. I think Ryder has invented and unleashed her own kitchen cargo cult.

Many of Ryder’s works are assemblages of items associated with domestic labour including ironing boards, brooms, feather dusters, and whisks. In Ryder’s hands, housework is weaponised. In the 1998 installation Implements a series of domestic devices are mounted atop long, thin ‘spears’: a spatula, meat tenderiser, crab claw cracker, eggbeater, tongs, whisk and dish-mop among them. At the other end, the spears feature metal barbs or hanks of hair. They appear as torture devices with literal and ritualistic power. These perverse kitchen cargo cult weapons are not labour-saving but expand and amplify never-ending, repetitive labour.

While the themes hitherto discussed in Ryder’s work mostly refer to the body, clothing, the meal, the home, and its domestic furnishings—in other words the domain of the personal and the private, there is simultaneously an ongoing body of practice that is about the public realm and especially the idea of the spectacle. It is time now to leave aside her role of shaman and turn to Mona’s persona as a showman.

At times throughout her career, Mona has made works that refer to the theatre, circus, dancehall, ballroom as well as the carousel and its kindred: namely, the music box, the automaton, and the wind-up toy. Circus follies [1980] is one of Ryder’s major early works, an elaborate ornamented cabinet that featured painted and sculpted elements, swags of red velvet curtains, lights, mirrors, and a series of painted vignettes and sculpted tableaux. Within the mise-en-scène were theatrical characters, ribald settings and moving parts. Like a music box or carousel, it had a wind-up mechanism that generated action and sound.

Since then, other spectacular spaces regularly appear in Ryder’s work including those that reference dance rather than theatre. In 2008’s Props for Barcelona Twostep, crutches have been modified and adorned to appear like human legs. Elsewhere, pairs of shoes placed sole-to-sole are wrapped or embellished to mimic insignia shaped a little like a heart, or in one case, a ram’s head. In Dance me to the End of the Night [2016] there is an enormous, fantastical basket chandelier whose crystals are substituted by chains of mussel shells. It sets the scene for dance hall and ballroom elements, especially the fetishised footwear assemblages, arranged in pairs as if to represent a room full of dancers denoted only by their feet.

But although the artist’s two strong identities as shaman and showman are present throughout her practice, they are not distinct but constantly intersect. The installation of works in Props for Barcelona Twostep creates a space that resembles a religious shrine full of icons as much as it references the dance. Ryder’s Ballroom Essences might equally be perfume or baptismal or holy water. It, too, refers simultaneously to a religious shrine and a dance hall. Finally, the red curtains that ripple their way throughout her practice are those of theatre and the ballroom as well as those of the tabernacle and the confessional.