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.

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