In general, Karen Ryan's work would have been perfect for my Vacant Chair thesis; she does a lot of sculptural work using chairs, though most of it seems more in the spirit of Duchamp's readymades. Karen says it best in her statement about her sculpture "In the Woods" :
My choice of creating designs which use discarded or unwanted objects and materials is not recent and has never been born out of fashion. The decision was a ethical one and a personal one, a reaction to the ever increasing consumer mountain of design and design waste as well as my own necessity created by a lack of money and resources. The struggle that I have with my conscience at the irrelevance of creating yet another one-off design object against a global backdrop of poverty, violence and greed remains a permanent dilemma in my creative process. The working philosophy I practice is simple, I use what others want no more, generally collected locally from within the city I live in Portsmouth.Her latest installation "Body" fits specifically in with the idea that a chair has anthropomorphic qualities. Karen pieced together sections of discarded chair frames with zip ties to create a human like skeleton. It was then placed in alleyways and fields to resemble a crime victim.
