Exhibitions Ann Ryan Harvest: Gratitude and Reflection 10th March 2026 - 1st April 2026

"My work continues to express my love of colour and whimsy. This exhibition is a nod of gratitude to the kindness and strength of womankind."
Ann Ryan 2026

VIRTUAL TOUR

DOWNLOAD EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

In this new solo exhibition, Ann Ryan returns to her richly textured world of stitched collage, where fabric fragments become carriers of memory, culture, and imagination. Drawing from her extensive collection of found and gifted textiles, she pieces together figures that share a collective femininity while celebrating their own distinct histories. Playful patterning, subtle humour, and echoes of global style movements shape a body of work that honours salvage, sustainability, and the emotional lives of materials.

Catalogue Essay by Kate McAuley, 2026
In Harvest: Gratitude and Reflection, Ann Ryan gathers the world the way one might pick from a garden - patiently, attentively, piece by piece. Pineapples, corn and citrus rise into exuberant headdresses. Parrots cluster along stitched branches. Dragonflies hover in open space, their threads trailing like faint lines of breath. These works feel abundant, but yet considered - as if each element has been chosen, handled, and placed with care.

Ryan describes her compositions as “pieces of a puzzle.” She does not draw in the traditional sense, but she assembles. Found and gifted textiles - fabrics that already carry memory in their weave - are cut, repositioned and stitched until disparate fragments come together as a whole. She approaches each work with a loose plan, then revisits and reworks it until an equilibrium emerges. It is, in many ways, a practice grounded in the art of repair - returning to the hand, to revision, to staying with something until it feels resolved.

These new works open outward. Silhouetted figures no longer merely contain pattern; they host ecosystems. In one work, native lorikeets, budgerigars and other native birds gather along a stitched branch against a quiet horizon of fabric, a nod to Ryan’s aging mother and to shared memories of birdlife that tether past to present. In another, a cockatoo perches beside a profile, its presence both decorative and deeply personal. Nostalgia is a gentle through-line here in this body of work, meaningful though careful to never tip into sentimentality.

The language of harvest is literal, grapes, celery, pumpkins and berries crowd into floral constellations reminiscent of Carmen Miranda headdresses, yet it also suggesting something more foundational: what is grown over time. Gratitude here is not abstract. It is embodied in repetition, in colour, in the steady return to the needle.
Although Ryan is not trying to be political, politics seeps into the work all the same. A flexed arm - drawn from a vintage image in Pix magazine - interrupts one silhouette with unmistakable strength. The gesture inevitably recalls Rosie the Riveter, the World War II icon who came to symbolise women’s industrial labour and capability. In Ryan’s version, however, the arm is stitched into patterned fabric, both ornamental and muscular, quietly challenging inherited ideas about femininity. Strength here does not shout. It is woven into the surface.

There is joy in these works, in the riot of citrus and rosellas, in the humour of insects tethered by thread. But the search for beauty and escapism is not naïve. It is, perhaps, an act of resistance. To choose colour. To choose whimsy. To stitch patiently in an age of speed and rupture. To believe that fragments can hold together.
Harvest: Gratitude and Reflection honours the slow accumulation of care. It celebrates the resilience of women not through spectacle, but a canny use of colour and pattern, memory and meticulous assembly, offering both abundance and sustenance.

ANN RYAN PROFILE
DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)

Ann Ryan
Harvest: Gratitude and Reflection 2025
Mixed media, framed
100cm x 84cm , framed size 104 x 84 x 6cm

Ann Ryan
A little birdy told me I 2025
Mixed media, framed
75cm x 56cm , framed size 79 x 60 x 4cm

Ann Ryan
A little birdy told me II 2025
Mixed media, framed
75cm x 56cm , framed size 79 x 60 x 4cm

Ann Ryan
Pretty Good for a Girl I 2025
Mixed media, framed
75cm x 58cm , framed size 79 x 62 x 4cm

Ann Ryan
Pretty Good for a Girl II 2025
Mixed media, framed
75cm x 58cm , framed size 79 x 62 x 4cm

Ann Ryan
The Dragonfly and Me 2025
Mixed media, framed
87cm x 54cm , framed size 91 x 58 x 4cm

Ann Ryan
The Orchid Whispers 2025
Mixed media, framed
67cm x 55cm , framed size 71 x 59 x 4cm

Ann Ryan
The Banawah Gang are Ok 2025
Mixed media, framed
80cm x 100cm , framed size 84 x 104 x 4cm