I am a multi-disciplinary artist who makes performative and sculptural works. I perform to communicate that, which cannot be told another way and choose the medium that best answers the question. I prefer to work with an unspectacular template- slowness,  simplicity, the body, a lack of props, and subversion of spectacle. I feel my work is its own quiet rebellion; rejecting and corrupting in strangeness or silence. 

My techniques, movements and messages are housed within narratives, materials, bodies, and environments. Being raised as a Mormon girl, I was supposed to be: nice, quiet, obedient, empathetic, feminine. These threads are still present for me and are explored in an all women ensemble piece, ‘I Object’, becoming themes of assault and trauma many women can relate to.

The female body, including my own, is also a constant source of resources in my work. For example, in my solo performance and performance film, ‘ritual of brides’ I work with the polarities of societally deemed feminine objects and ways of being. I’ve developed a moving image: a girl masked with flowers, poised with fist up and legs straight, juxtaposed against a partially clothed body revealing an angry face.

My being raised Mormon is a source of both inspiration and rejection in my work. My interest in working with water and collaborating with/starring women and women’s stories in my work, comes from both the path I took away from religion and its influence on my early years. Water has important meaning in Mormonism (baptism by water and sacrament).  The water element shows up in both my performance and sculptural work, particularly ‘AAMAA’ a series of performances, drawings and short films I made with Nepali women during my Fulbright and through the process of making sculptures from paper pulp.

I work with my body and/or collaborators’ with a playful approach: improvisational, reactive, and interactive. By scoring works, I build frameworks for: ideation, performance, tension, sensitivity, memory, repetition, defiance and nonconformity. Practices that inform my work include; daily movement routines, research, listening, and dialogue. Collaboration is an essential method/process for me, as are humor, and even confusion.

Performance, for me, is a series of sculptures, made by the body, in a timeframe, ideally within an environment I’ve sculpted or curated. My interest in the forms the human body can take have recently crossed over to sculpting objects with a variety of paper pulps, wax, and occasionally, found objects. I am interested in time being a factor in the process to create layering, natural growth, forms I cannot plan, and surfaces that mimic skin. In this way the sculpture relates to the body moving through time in performance. My trajectory to the visual art realm originated in performance and directing, particularly with scenic design. I began watercolors of set designs, then made models, then the sets were built in reality, then interacted with the body. Ultimately the sets became sculptures, props, or another body.

Performance is sculpture. Sculpture is performance.

-Ryan Elisabeth Reid, 2020