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Sometimes the seed of an idea can grow into something monumental. In Veronica Ryan’s case, kernels and pods have grown into a whole career filled with organic forms bursting to life with stories and symbolism.

It’s an approach that has served her well, winning her the Turner prize in 2022. And now the Montserrat-born British artist is being given the full retrospective treatment, with a show taking viewers from her early experiments in lead to more recent sculptures made of twine, bandages and plastic.

It’s the new stuff you see first, hanging pendulously from the ceiling and piled up on the floor. Long, thin coloured sacks dangle on wires, bulbously weighed down by plastic bottles and seed pods. They look like Ruth Asawa let loose at the tip, minimalism at the recycling centre.

Cardboard avocado trays are stacked into improvised geometric sculptures; plastic bottles in the corner have been cast in ceramic; teabags are arranged into a grid on the wall; little objects are wrapped in bandages. All this everyday detritus has been repurposed and recycled into new forms.

But that’s nothing new in art, not by a long shot. Turning trash into sculpture has been done a million times in a million ways. At one point, you couldn’t go to a gallery without tripping over a bronze bin bag or stepping on a ceramic cigarette butt.

So what makes the good stuff here work are the ideas, rather than the materials themselves or how she’s transformed them. Ryan uses avocados, tea and mango seed pods to symbolise global trade – the way “over there” comes “over here” and gets consumed. It’s a story of exploitation and migration that just as easily applies to people as it does fruit. When she wraps things in string and bandages, it is to symbolise repair and healing. When she recycles plastic it is to show that even things that are discarded can have value.

Her pile of gorgeous multicoloured ceramic cocoa pods and her giant bronze magnolia seed tell their stories directly, confidently, boldly. Just like her excellent public sculptures of soursop, custard apple and breadfruit in London’s Hackney, they have an idea, a narrative, and they communicate it really well.

But the more things are wrapped up and obscured, the more the work holds you at arm’s length. Dangling sacks filled with plastic or objects wrapped in twine just look like bits of rubbish. You can only really untangle their meaning with a list of materials in your hand – oh it’s not just some trash, there’s a mango pod inside, got it. They’re not beautiful enough to work just as objects, they rely on ideas, context, material.

On the one hand, the first bit of text on the wall here is Ryan saying she refuses to give any specific meanings to her work, but on the other, you can only begin to understand what she’s doing with most of this new stuff when it’s spelled out for you. You can’t have it both ways: you can’t make work that is totally open to interpretation and then make work that is so heavily obscured it looks a bit meaningless.

Just as a joke that needs explaining probably isn’t that funny, a piece of art that only works when you’ve got a handout probably isn’t successful art.

Ryan’s earlier work is all upstairs, and if you ignore the silliness of presenting everything in reverse chronological order, loads of it is fantastic. There are seed-like bronze forms everywhere, laid on metallic pillows, soursop pods nestled on a slab of marble, lead sheets perforated with organic-looking slits. Ryan is combining symbols of Montserrat and the Caribbean with the language of Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse and Henry Moore. These signifiers of trade and colonialism are being used to infiltrate the didactic, imposing, impenetrable and very white world of modernism. A lot of it is brilliant, a lot of it is beautiful.

Other early works experiment with lead, a toxic material twisted into something aesthetic, something sculptural. That’s when it clicks and you realise what Ryan’s up to. She is reshaping and reforming the material world in order to make it into something better, to help it heal. She is remaking the world in her own image, and letting everyone see themselves reflected in it too. That’s the seed of an idea that’s worth watching bloom.