Courtney N. Ryan

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Courtney N. Ryan is an artist and professor who lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She predominately works sculpturally creating collections of ceramic objects inspired by an affinity for the florae of the natural world, and clay’s ability to mimic textures and colors from the environment into her practice.

She is inspired by nature’s ingenuity and tenacity, in particular the way plants travel and spread through seeds. Figurative tendrils, folds and cervices, and highly pocked surfaces engulf the seed-pod objects which are created in response from direct observations of collected natural materials from personal travel outdoors.

By taking time to survey, gather, arrange, inspect, and ultimately make, Ryan primarily uses Porcelain clay, as well as Earthenware and Stoneware to create sculptural forms that are lively and imagined, yet still strangely familiar of the natural world.

BIOGRAPHY:

Ryan received her MFA in Ceramics and Sculpture from Georgia Southern University in 2018, and her BFA in Studio Arts from Columbus State University in 2013. Currently she works as a Professor of Foundation Studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and was previously at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL as a Fine Arts Specialist.

Recently she was awarded Savannah College of Art and Design’s Presidential Fellowship for Faculty Development Award which Ryan will use towards a summer residency at Vermont Studio Center in August 2023 to develop a ceramics focused project titled The Travelers. Later in summer 2024, Ryan will embark on a two-month ceramics intensive residency at NES Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland, where she will be working in the northern tundra of the upper north of the country to continue The Travelers project in an almost alien geographic setting.

Ryan has shown and presented her work nationally in galleries including The Delaware Contemporary, MINT Gallery of Atlanta, Georgia, Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, Jacksonville University in Florida, Bridgewater College in Virginia, and the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Internationally she has exhibited work in a group show at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, as well as during a residency at WIT in Waterford, Ireland. Her studio is located at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center in Atlanta, GA as well as a home studio in East Atlanta, Georgia.