Kaelan Ryan

Canadian multidisciplinary artist and recent art history graduate, specializing in print media and fibres. based in Montréal and Alberta. [email protected]

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Purple sneakie and green flowers embroidery, December 2021

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Embroidery, leaf and abstract shapes in earth tones, december 2020

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Anotha one

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Cannot stop embroidering!

First attempts ~ new additions are a sneaker, and a newfoundland scene (a gift)

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first ever attempt at embroidery! Attempting somewhat to reference this photo I took on a gorgeous day in british columbia last summer (last pic). Trying out lots of stitches for my first time, including chain stitch, satin stitch, stem stitch, and a painterly stitch (as well as backstitch/running stitch)

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Real and Imagined Spaces, set of 3 intaglio prints (with screen layer), 2019. 

31cm x 45cm (paper size) & 10cm x 17.5cm (plate). Copper plate etching with aquatint on japanese paper, screen printed layer on one edition (brown layer in first photo)

I don’t usually include artist’s statements but I feel that I’d like to explain some of my thinking behind this one because it has kind of become accumulative of a lot of the stuff I’ve been working on in the last little while. I’ve noticed that lately my art has taken me into the domestic realm, probably a result of moving three times in a year, finding an apartment, and living in new cities. I wanted to do an aquatint plate set (because aquatint is great for reproducing light and shadows) that explored what I call “real and imagined spaces,” architectural spaces which almost could be real (in terms of light, angles, corners...) but don’t quite make sense. I took photos/sketches from around my own home and the spaces I inhabit and then abstracted the architectural forms to take any sense of real or imaginary out of these spaces, making them almost real but almost imagined. I wanted to address the places around me in a new way, thinking about architecture and how light moves in a space, and taking a step back from familiarity with their properties and morphing it into my own invention. I have depicted how I think places would look if lit in a certain/different way, or built in a certain way, based on what I know about light and architecture, yet I know they are inherently incorrect, making these architectural details real and imagined. I am trying to separate meaning from the domestic space. I want to make it something metaphysical or unfamiliar, because it is so personal and contrived. The screen layer is, in honesty, just an aesthetic addition, but it does compliment the ideas of space and place, as it encourages us to consider the space of the paper in contrast to the plate. Eventually the copper plate prints will exist in addition to photo plate prints, and I want to continue this series and make many more of these tiny etchings as well. All in all, this tiny and relatively subdued project is actually an accumulation of a lot of things I have been thinking about in the last year, and brings together a lot of my ideas about domesticity and space which have consumed my art practice for the whole semester. 

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A new zine, called It’s So Hard to Find an Apartment in Montréal, 2019. Screen printed, about 9″ x 12″ opened up (have not measured, its an estimate). 9 copies, 8 pages + folds out into a larger poster on the back side. 

Lately I have been preoccupied with moving. My roommates and I let up our leases and have been trying to find an apartment together for months. There is a housing crisis taking place in Montreal right now, spring of 2019, and it has consumed my life. I was asking the same questions over and over again about lease dates, availability, number of bedrooms, how sunny the places are, prices, and so on, in an endless loop. I was calling landlords everyday, fretting about not hearing back, places I liked were snatched up before I could even see them, kijiji ads disappeared within thirty minutes of them being posted. Finally I took all these banal frustrations and put them into a zine, and voila, it became It’s So Hard to Find an Apartment in Montréal. And by the way, I found an apartment.

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Dissection, 2019, Multimedia

Intaglio, textile, copper plate etching, digital print, xante transparencies/printing, japanese and rag papers, wooden dowels, twine...

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Dissection (Detail)

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Installation view of Guten Bye, for art matters 2019 

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Untitled (Greece 2018), Screen print, 2019

Screen print utilizing a personal archive through my photography from a trip last summer.

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My first attempt at screen printing... 3 variation prints in editions of 3! Happy with how it turned out. playing with colour, composition, etc. first tries yay!

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Babushkas, 2015

Stoneware with underglaze

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New prints, bad photos 

three-plate copper intaglio print, etching, 2019

WIP playing with scale, composition, and colour. Tried some traditional dry point and soft ground etching, as well as white ground! Just tests!! Going to keep playing with it. 

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Guten Bye, an artist’s book I made in 2018

“Guten Bye (Meine Mutter and I) is an artist book which depicts my relationship to my mother and her homeland of Germany. Language is something that connects us with our culture, family and collective histories but can simultaneously make us feel so separate from them, especially as a second-generation immigrant. A similar scenario to many children of immigrant parents, my mother is of German mother tongue, which I am only now beginning to learn how to speak. In this book I embrace the gap between the languages of my family and I, exploring how my idea of the “self” can be formed through multiple identities and in-betweenness. The text begins completely in German, slowly merging with English in messy and half-translated sentences until it ends entirely in English. The book reads like someone easing from one language to a new one, which is true for both my mother and myself as we learn each other’s languages. The content explores the intimate aspects of the immigrant experience, such as changing languages, as well as the identity of second-generation immigrants in relation to their parents’s culture. The resulting text resonates with the ever-present efforts of those with dual identities to clumsily find belonging in both.” 

Heavy rag paper, inkjet print, embossment, photo collage, found object prints in ink. 

See it at Art Matters festival, March 15th if you’re in Montreal! 

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I have also been working on some more prints

Émilie  Photolithography print  2015

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