The woman who creates moldy fruit with – Gemstones?

This is the art sculptures of Kathleen Ryan, a New York-based sculptor. Insistent on their physicality, Ryan’s sculptures recast found and handmade objects as spectacular, larger-than-life hieroglyphs of Americana.

Her mediums, which range from bowling balls to a deconstructed Airstream camper, are both familiar and iconographic, and seemingly lost in time.

These materials are often at odds with the subjects they represent: delicate, sensual grapes are rendered with heavy, utilitarian concrete, mold colonies are composed of semi-precious gemstones.

As in Dutch vanitas paintings, the relics of the everyday seed pods, jewelry, domestic fixtures, moldy fruit – become tongue-in-cheek allegories for sexuality, decadence, and the cycle of life.