Ryan Gander

Gander's fascination with techniques of creative and associative collisions is evident in his earliest 'Loose Association' public lecturers, begun in 2002, and published together in 2007 as the book Loose Associations and Other Lectures.[14] These lectures range across material, from meditations on the film Back to the Future to the writing of Italo Calvino, modernism to children's books. Motifs of association and collision are evident across his works and he has explored techniques of association used by earlier modernist artists and architects, notably Luis Barragán and Ernö Goldfinger. With the sculptural series The Way Things Collide (2012–ongoing),[15] Gander collides two elements that are hardest to be associated logically with the human mind, each is a game, a challenge, with narrative consequences. A knotted condom is left on a USM cabinet; a skate wing rests on a suitcase; a macaroon balances on a stool. These are experiments in minimum constituents of narrative.[15]

Gander believes that everyone makes creative decisions in their daily life and can be a creative artist.[16] These everyday acts of creativity, he argues, are often more exciting than the creative artworks of celebrated contemporary artists, whose repetition of a successful formula is contrary to creativity. Art for Gander is about "trying to make some original contribution to human history and knowledge, like an explorer".[4]

To avoid habitualised ways of working, Gander has looked to children's creativity, frequently collaborating with his daughters to realise artworks. Likewise, since the early 2000s he has used an array of pseudonyms to produce work outside of his typical concerns. These fictional characters spread across an increasingly growing web of citation and cross-reference, self-corroborating and self-sustaining fictional and possible historical events. In 2014, Gander told an interviewer that: 'I hope my work is [...] expansive or "multiplicit" (that is not a word but it should be). An objective is that the work has more end points than starting points – like a 1970s children's 'Choose your own adventure story''.[17] An influential book Gander has referred to in several interviews is Edward Packer's Choose Your Own Adventure books, first published in 1976, and marketed to 10 to 14 year olds. In these books the reader begins at page one, follows instructions at the foot of the page to turn to page two, from where instructions at the foot of that page motivates a decision that splits the narrative.[18]

Gander is a wheelchair user with a long-term physical disability,[19] a severe brittle bone condition which hospitalised him for long periods of time as a child.[20] In 2006, his installation at the old Whitechapel Library, Is this Guilt in you too?, where he filled the space with obstacles, detritus, dead ends, and illusions meant to confound visitors and symbolize the inequitable difficulties faced by disabled people, was part of the Arts Council England's Adjustments exhibitions whose aim was "to address transitional thinking on disability, equality and inclusion". His work for the 2011 Venice Biennale exhibition featured an action-figure sized sculpture that represents him while he falls from a wheelchair.[21]

Despite various interviews and works made in which Gander explicitly states he does not understand himself to be disabled or "differently abled" to anyone else, his work is interpreted, often by able-bodied commentators, as that of a disabled artist. The curator Matthew Higgs, for example, has argued that his disability contributes to his unique way of seeing: "The first thing I ever noticed about Ryan was that he uses a wheelchair. I mention this not in passing, nor as a gratuitous aside. Whilst I accept that some people might argue that this information is irrelevant, I would like to think that the fact that Ryan uses a wheelchair does – at least – have some bearing on my subsequent understanding of his work."[22]

In recent years, Gander has felt compelled to address his disability in order to correct other people's perception of his exceptionalism as a wheelchair user. In the BBC television programme Me, My Selfie and I with Ryan Gander, broadcast in 2019, Gander met a transhumanist who suggests that him he might be "improved" too by replacing his legs with bionic ones modelled on cheetahs. Gander replies: "Being in a wheelchair doesn't affect my view on the world. In an age where everyone identifies with being different, I am someone who actually can't walk and don't associate with being disabled. I don't tick the Arts Council funding box that says 'disabled' because I don't identify ... I don't want cheetah legs. I don't know any cheetahs."[23][24]

In his work The End (2020) an animatronic mouse poking its head through a gallery wall it's burrowed through elaborates further on the capturing of difference, voicing the opinion of the artist:

Difference has become a currency of sorts. I happen to have been born with a great difference to most, and one that is visually recognisable at that. A curse to some, but a blessing to others. To me, it is neither. I am not sure how or when, but at some point, I just chose not to identify with my difference. I chose to ignore it, not in the hope that it would go away, but in the hope that being different would not consume my time and energy that could be better spent doing all the good stuff in the world.[25]

In 2010, Gander's sculpture The Happy Prince was commissioned by the Public Art Fund for Central Park, New York City.[26] This concrete resin sculpture presented the ruin of the fictional statue from the final chapter in Oscar Wilde's children's book The Happy Prince (1888).[26]

In 2012, Gander was commissioned to produce Escape hatch to Culturefield,[27] situated within a wooded area of the Karlslaue Park, Kassel, Delaware, as part of dOCUMENTA 13.[27] Off the park's designated paths, a trapdoor fabricated from iron and concrete appeared to lead to an underground series of tunnels of some kind. The hatch, visibly partially open so that the spectator might partially peer inside, showed ladder rungs leading down.[27]

The same year, 2012, Gander's created It's got such good heart in it was commissioned by Mexico City Zoo, and located in the 'activity centre' for lions.[28] Based on Sol LeWitt's open cube structure, and the story that LeWitt allowed his cats to use his redundant sculpture, upscaled and added to, it was offered as a climbing frame and scratching post for lions.[28]

In 2018, Gander produced two public artworks, the first sited outside BALTIC gallery, Newcastle,[29] titled To Give Light (Northern Aspirational Charms).[29] Ten minimal, simplified forms based on ten objects originally designed to emit or shine light were cast in black concrete and arranged chronologically in a circular configuration. Each element featured three links of mooring chain attached, implying a nautical functionality as well as alluding to trinkets on an oversized charm bracelet.[29]

Later in 2018, outside The Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Biennial.[30] his work titled Time Moves Quickly,[30] consisted of five public artworks, functional as benches, placed in a circle in the public square outside the cathedral. Each artwork was enlarged and reproduced from a maquette made by a child from Knotty Ash Primary using building blocks that, when rearranged, made a model of the cathedral.[31]

In 2019, Gander was commissioned to produce a public sculpture by Cambridge Biomedical Campus. Titled The Green & The Gardens,[32] Gander led a concept that transformed the space into a green heart of the campus, a shared place for everyone.[32] In collaboration with Gillespies, landscape architects, they developed the design, selected the planting, furniture and lighting. Gander integrated sculptural elements: coloured tents that glow at night, an open gateway, a stile, and a community noticeboard.[32]

Other public artworks include: We are only human (Incomplete sculpture for Scraborough to be finished by snow) (2022) at Scarborough Castle, UK;[33] Ghost Ship (2022) in Sunderland City Centre, UK;[34] Our Long Dotted Line (or 37 years previous) (2021) at Space K, Korea;[35] The day to day accumulation of hope, failure and ecstasy – The zenith of your career (The Last Degas) (2017),[36] exhibited in the gardens of The Contemporary Austin Commission (USA), in late Autumn, 2018; Because editorial is costly (2016),[37] a giant, swollen, mirror-finish stainless steel version of "Rapport de volumes" (1919) by Georges Vantongerloo in a crater as if crash landed exhibited during the Okayama Art Summit (JP);[38] Dad's Halo Effect (2014),[39] three polished stainless steel sculptures initially conceived by the artist's father when he worked at General Motors in the 1980s, and based on parts of the steering mechanism of a commercial Bedford truck, re-imagined by the artist from his father's verbal description; No political motivation (2012), a faithful reproduction of the revolving New Scotland Yard sign constructed to display the words 'THE WORLD S FAIR', incorrectly typeset with a half space between the characters 'D' and 'S' – meaning the sign could be interpreted in one of two differing ways, as an advertisement for an event or as a political slogan. Based at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico.

In 2013, Gander and creative consultant Simon Turnbull proposed plans to open Fairfield International, a residential art school in a former primary school in Saxmundham, Suffolk.[5] Modelled on a hybrid of the Dutch academy and artist residency, Fairfield International would provide six residencies a year to hard-up artists in need of a retreat.[5] however, despite raising funds, the project was cancelled in 2015 due to a combination of factors, chiefly the bureaucracy of dealing with the county council over the purchase of the building, and the presence of Japanese Knotweed,[50] which meant insurers could not offer indemnity against the site.[50]