Emily Ryalls
Emily Ryalls is a Wakefield-based artist working with photography, performance and sculpture to create spaces for engagement and connection. Central to Ryalls’ practice is an exploration of women’s embodied knowledge. She is fascinated by the ways in which we acquire knowledge, and who is afforded the space to share such knowledge.
During a two-week residency at YSP and The Art House in April, Ryalls will develop a project focusing on performance, land art, as well as archives and knowledge systems. She will work with local women to explore body mapping practices inspired by the natural world in collaboration with analogue photographic techniques. Within her work, the camera becomes a point of connection, and the resulting imagery acts as a record of the exchanges between women.
Since 2023, Ryalls has been developing this body of feminist research during her MA at the University of York’s Centre for Women’s Studies. Her research brings together diverse groups of women, inviting them to reimagine their body as an archive – storing memories like a sponge. The project investigates how we can best care, share, and preserve this bodily knowledge.
Ryalls will continue to develop the project following the residency, which will culminate in a collaborative performance work at YSP in summer 2025. The Art House will present the artist’s first solo exhibition in autumn 2025.
You may also like
Matt Howard: Resident
–A collection of poems inspired by YSP by the YSP / Laureate Fund poet in residence, Matt Howard, with photographs by Emily Ryalls.- Art Outdoors
Roger Hiorns: Seizure
In 2008 Roger Hiorns transformed an empty council flat in Southwark, London into Seizure, a sparkling blue world of copper sulphate crystals. The work was created using 75,000 litres of liquid copper sulphate, which was pumped into the former dwelling to create a strangely beautiful and somewhat menacing crystalline growth on the walls, floor, ceiling and even the bath of the abandoned flat. - News
A selection of Henry Moore works from YSP are to be included in an exhibition at Kew
25 August 2025 - Art Outdoors
Elisabeth Frink: Standing Man