Paul Ryan was born in Leicester in 1968. His only formal art training was a foundation course at Chelsea Collage of Art in 1995-96, by which time he was already exhibiting in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom. His first solo show was in the Red Herring Gallery, Brighton, in 1990, and since then he has had exhibitions in Leicester City Art Gallery, Broughton House Gallery, Cambridge, and various venues in London, as well as in Norway, Lithuania and Bulgaria. His work is mainly two-dimensional, with recent exhibitions concentrating on a body of sketchbooks built up over the last fifteen years, from which random elements are used to produce the finished work. In Round in Circles – Millennium Medal, the artist’s first medal, the two sides contrast micro and macro images in the fingerprint and the solar system. The fingerprint, the artist writes, represents ‘a moment in time (a moment of contact). We all leave fingerprints. In this they represent the whole of humankind without discrimination. At the same time thay are a potent image of the individual – separate, special, and different from all others.’ The solar system appears on the other side of the medal, with the planets arranged as they were at midnight on 31 December 1999. ‘Once again, a moment in time is represented. The ellipses of the planets orbiting the sun trace a pattern not unlike the fingerprint. However,this is the “greater scheme of things”. It demonstrates the human will to “map out” and “record” in order to mark our place in both position and time.’
Round in Circles – Millenium Medal
Round in Circles – Millenium Medal
By: Paul Ryan, 1999
Medium: cast bronze
Size: 90mm
Cast by: Niagara Falls Castings
Issue: The Medal, no. 36 (2000)
Edition: 35