ABOUT

Lori Ryker (b. 1963, Phoenix, AZ) is an artist based in Paradise Valley, Montana. Her artwork explores an ongoing internal dialogue with and impressions of the natural world (physical and spiritual) through her paintings and monotypes. She views her work as documentation or glimpses into a metaphysical preoccupation of awe, beauty and belonging.

Ryker’s artwork evokes the constantly changing phenomena that moves across the ancient forms of the Earth. The dynamics of color, mark making in oil stick or brush, and the fluidity of paint, both layered and translucent, thick and opaque, build up her canvas and monotypes inspiring the viewer to recognize the as of yet unknown and connect with their past experiences of the world.

The aspiration is not to reference a particular place but to draw out the viewer’s intimate experiences and collected memories of the world while meditating on shared and interrelated whole.

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In Lori’s own words

I have been drawing and painting as long as I have been playing in the woods; across states and oceans, these days in Montana. As a child I didn’t see myself as an artist. It seemed like something other people were. Later, I was fascinated by the making of buildings, their spatial narrative. A building’s tangibility, their making of places, drew me to study architecture.

I knew for a very long time, decades, my choice did not suit me best. While I am a passionate designer, the structure of the profession worked against my greater sensibility to more expansive creativity. Printmaking classes while a graduate student was an opening to greater expressive freedom. Teaching and research made space for my creative thinking, and inspiring students was a gift.

In a drive across country, I felt a change in how I saw the world. Awestruck by the austerity of the Wyoming landscape, sensing both its fragility and power brought about a transformative experience I recognized as beauty. There was also the reflection that humankind was destroying the very experiences that binds us together in exchange for financial profit. This experience led me on a quest – to understand my experience and how it fit in our current cultural thinking.

 As it turns out beauty is not touchable, it is ephemeral and internal. Beauty, contrary to contemporary use of the word, is not a property of the land, but human conception; painting and sculpture, writing, music, architecture and poetry. Art is a transfixer of beauty, connection and relationship. It is transcendence we create. Beauty is the mystifying experience of being, of exchange. It is a phenomena at the core of our existence that makes life worthwhile.

 I want my art to transfix and transform. In an effort to connect our experiences to nature I work with materials that retain their primal sense of earthliness; oils, pigments, cotton and linen, sticks and feathers. I use my hands and muscles to create; be it paintings, prints, pastels, or small hand-built artifacts to connect to the world.

I aspire to make material poems for others, where the moments a person spends with the art may bring about an experience of beauty.

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Biography

Lori Ryker received a Bachelor of Environmental Design from Texas A&M University (1985), a Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design (1991) and a PhD in Architecture from Texas A&M University (2000). She studied printmaking under Michael Mazur at the Carpenter Center (1989-91).

Lori’s work has been featured in Mountain Living Magazine, and CROP Journal (Texas Tech). She has received numerous awards for her creative work, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a State of Montana Artists Innovation Award. Select solo and group shows include Wilder Goods, Bozeman, Gallery South, Cincinnati, OH, and pop-up shows in Montana and Texas. Her work is in private collections across the United States.

Lori also designs custom homes and small commercial work at studioryker https://studioryker.com, and is the founder and director of Artemis Institute https://artemisinstitute.org. She has lectured nationally about her work, beauty, issues of sustainability and climate change, and published three books.

archival work - monotypes