The oldest artist ever to win the Turner spent years feeling as if she was invisible. Now, her quiet, contemplative sculptures have finally been rewarded with the British art world’s biggest prize
It’s the morning after Veronica Ryan won the Turner prize, a moment celebrated with her name being projected triumphantly on Liverpool’s vast Radio City tower, and it still hasn’t sunk in. “It feels as though there’s this separate person, who might be me, who’s won the Turner prize,” she says. “At the moment, there’s a disconnect.”
At 66, Ryan becomes the oldest artist to have won the award. In some ways, she has also had the hardest path to get here. In her winner’s speech in the grandeur of Liverpool’s St George’s Hall on Wednesday night, she thanked and named three lost siblings, Patricia, Josephine and David. When I ask about them, she tells me baldly: “They committed suicide.” There have been years of trauma and grief for the bereaved family to cope with. And other losses, too. Ryan’s career had a promising start, with plenty of opportunities and shows when she graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art. But that ground to a halt. It was almost as if she was swept away by the incoming tide of the Young British Artists, who were a few years younger than her. “There was a whole period,” she says, “when people wouldn’t show my work and wouldn’t even reply when I sent them images.”
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