Q&A with Grace C. Ryder

Briefly describe your thesis project. What themes are you exploring, and in what mediums/with what materials?
For all of 2024, I kept track of every time I cried, the location, and reason why. At the end of the year, I was left with a dataset of 158 instances of crying. I chose to represent this data in a physical form through delicate ceramic wall pieces. Each month is represented by one tear, and each tear is scaled to the number of times I cried during that month. Alongside the wall piece is a dot matrix printer that has printed out all of the data onto continuous tractor paper

What do you hope someone feels when they experience your work?
I aim to evoke a feeling of awe from the viewer, not only from the scale of the piece, but through the delicate nature of the forms and finish. I also hope that the viewer thinks about their own crying patterns, recognizing the absurdity of the frequency of my tears compared to their own.

Did you always know this would be your final project? When or how did you figure it out?
I initially had an entirely different thesis project planned out where I was collecting love letters from people and painting them. This project where I was tracking my crying had existed in the back of my brain for the whole year, but I had never really considered turning it into my thesis. One day it just clicked that I was more interested in putting form to this data than following a formulaic plan to paint love letters over and over again. I had talked about my original project so much that it felt like I was just beating a dead horse. I needed to work on something that I was excited about, and do something other than painting.

What has been surprising as you’ve worked on this project?
I have always labeled myself as a “painter that dabbles in sculpture,” but have never considered myself to be a “sculptor.” Ever since my first semester, I’ve fought back against three-dimensional forms because I wanted to commit to being a painter through grad school, and I’ve maintained that as my identity and medium up until now. As I’ve been working on my thesis project, I have slowly begun to accept that I am not only a painter, but also a sculptor, and it’s possible to be both.

What was your path to becoming an artist like?
In my freshman year of college, I decided to declare a major in math with an emphasis on statistics. I didn’t immediately click with the art department and felt like I needed to do something more “practical.” In the first semester of my junior year, I was taking a painting class and failing out of an upper-level statistics class — I felt like I had made a mistake. I was a completely different person when I spent all day in the studio painting versus when I spent all day in the math library working on problem sets. It was a tough transition, but I managed to finish four years of a studio art degree in the rest of the time I had left, and I enjoyed every second of it.

If you could go back to your first day in this program, what would you tell yourself?
I would tell myself to stop holding onto whatever form of art making or practice I had developed before and start over again from the beginning. I was so hellbent on creating these big, polished paintings that I lost time in my first semester — even my first year — that I could have spent experimenting with other forms and materials. It wasn’t until I finally surrendered and accepted that this was a space that I could use to investigate other ways of making that I finally started to have fun and take the time to pursue new skills that I had always been curious about.