Ryan is a working class artist and amateur conservationist in Cumbria, originally from Teesside. They are the leader of the Wildlife Society and founder of the Gallery Society at the UoC, Advisory Panel member at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh, and founder of Claimed Stills, dedicated to community engagement and events around post-photography and ecologically responsible practice.

Throughout his BA (1st, Hons) in Photography, they researched the Ecology and Ethics of Contemporary Photography, developing a framework for an ethically-considered, environmentally-concerned arts practice.

Beginning as a music-educator, Ryan has been running community groups, teaching groups, and privately tutoring for nine years. He has created work through collaborations with the RSPB (Saltholme), English Heritage, Tullie House Gallery and Museum, and the Cumbria Wildlife Trust. Alongside his arts practice, Ryan is a keen amateur conservationist, leading the Wildlife Society and hosting weekly conservation work parties and wildlife walks, collaborating with the Cumbria Wildlife trust, and contributing volunteer time to numerous projects. His first conservation project was a two-year long restoration of an outdoor leisure site into a woodland and meadow populated with orchids, sparrowhawk, buzzard, muntjac, roe deer, rabbits, stoats and even visited by a white-tailed eagle.

Ryan's research-based practice explores the Ecologies of Post-Industrial sites through digital surfaces, using Post-Photography and experimental techniques to collate materials across time to explore expansions of human perceptions of time. Creating work through extended occupations of environments, Ryan collaborates with their inhabitants to create work that has been co-authored by habitats and those that live within them. Strictly working with local environments, or those accessible by public transport, their representations of environmental changes are crafted to avoid further damages, creating work whilst minimising emissions and energy consumption.

As one of the first certified Climate Aware Photographers by the Carbon Literacy Project and Redeye Photographic Network, his practice is always evolving to protect the environments that he occupies, using digital technology to duplicate lifeforms, habitats, and their interactions, rather than extracting samples and causing environmental disturbances.

Often working with communities, he strives to create inclusive environments for students of all ages to learn together, and participate in works through workshops, one-to-one tuition, and collaborative ways of making together.

Ryan's most recent project, "Entanglement", exhibited in June 23, saw the artist fabricating a fossil record for the living world, creating objects that visualised a potential future, where plant life was only visible by its ancient remains upon the debris of human industries. Beginning with a collaboration with the Cumbria Wildlife Trust, they participated in survey days across Cumbria, cataloguing plant life and marine life across post-industrial sites in Whitehaven and Glenridden. These digital samples were given virtual bodies, with the artist engineering environments to facilitate their interaction with virtual versions of their environments.

Select Projects

Entanglement is exploring virtual surfaces and fabricating fossil records of the living world, investigating the potential fates of humanity and their nonhuman neighbours. Exhibiting as part of Convergence, June 2nd-10th 2023, at the Valem Gallery, University of Cumbria, Carlisle.

Echoes of Industry chronicles the remnants of Teesside’s Steel Industries, presented alongside the stories of their people, immortalising the experiences of their employees, and their costs to human health in the area. Created in collaboration with a veteran of British Steel, he selected the sites, images, and stories. Exhibited in May 2022, printed in book form, featured in the Power of Place directory as part of the Peer-to-Peer festival 2022, hosted by the VMA in Hong Kong, Openeye Gallery in Liverpool, and Redeye photographic network.

Reburial participates in the process of burying artefacts to preserve their condition, a solemn practice conducted by archaeologists and curators when an object is beyond present limits of technology or care. Created with the support of Tullie House Gallery and Museum, with particular thanks and gratitude to Melanie, Elsa and Martin, for their endless knowledge and generosity throughout.

Post-Normal was created in collaboration with my Mother, Bernie, illuminating the household objects that signified a transformative stage of end of life care, following complications of COVID-19 and long-COVID. Work featured in the Sterling Photography Festival, as part of the digital exhibition and book in 2022.

Remnants pictured flowers against industrial backdrops, parodying a framing device used in internal marketing materials of the Steel and Mining industries, intended to demonstrate the ‘thriving’ coexistence of the industrial and natural worlds in the UK throughout the 80s. Prints were displayed alongside a montage film, with original clips and audio taken from archival material. The assembled film illustrated the ethos and marketing behind the industrial identities at the height of their success.

Guardians was a zine created with volunteers from English Heritage and Tullie House Gallery and Museum, celebrating the contributions of the incredible volunteer workforce of the UK in the History and Arts sectors.