Painting
Acrylic, waterbased media on linen, paper or canvas board.
Old Sun, Trigger alarm / Flood, Omicron Volcano and German Floods July 21 - Solo show Bremerhaven 2024
On Meditation - Acrylic, chalk pen and felt tip pen on canvas. 40cmx60cm Hannover Yoga Schule 2024
Mysterious Earth - Acrylic on linen 15cmx15cm 2023
Rose Bower - Acrylic on linen 60cmx80cm 2023 - Solo show Bremerhaven 2024
Earth day / Blue drift - mixed media painting, 2023
Earth Day / Solar - Acrylic on linen 15cmx15cm 2023
Meadow - Acrylic on linen 50cmx60cm 2023 - Solo show Bremerhaven 2024
Unnatural history / Oil spill Brunsbuttel - Acrylic on linen 13cmx9cm 2023
Heat - detail Acrylic on linen 110cmx110cm 2023 - Solo show Bremerhaven 2024
Unnatural history / Portovaya - Acrylic on linen 13cmx9cm 2022
Earth Day / We are all water - Acrylic on linen 15cmx15cm 2023
Unnatural history / Cyclone Gabrielle - Acrylic on linen 13cmx9cm 2023
Waterfalls
Susie Wright / July 2020
At Wallbach lido, Lenk
in an empty underground changing room
I hear no chatter…..
just a background chug,
like being down in the bowels of a ship.
This is the sound of machinery that heats and circulates water,
where bubbles rise
to a generous open-air Jacuzzi whose meniscus hazes
a mighty vista.
Up by the pool
a tall metal shiny
wide mouthed geezer presides over 50 metres,
where an inflatable plastic steeple chase,
over blown in yellow and green
floats across three full lanes.
Sinking into a chilled 21 degrees of the drinkable brink,
ducking under a glassy surface of calm
where the only thing to be seen,
is light on the equally pocked pristine aluminium floor.
This water
has been thrown in massive volume
from a great height.
It has been propelled through small crevasses,
hussled, battered and forced into cascades across the mountainside.
Its frothy volume has sprung up to cool hikers passing by and
created microclimates with its permanent drizzle on the rocks.
Piped and pumped, it has come to its dead end in a
lined aluminiferous basin,
its momentum halted to a simple play
of refracting prisms.
Still and cool, rippled only by the waft of a hand.
I take in a few lengths and at eye level
watch a wren catch a worm.
Otter-like, I move in and it scarpers.
At the end of my swim, energised, I stop to gaze back
at a perfectly mirrored scene.
Black sedimentary crusts and white glacial peaks
tower high above the valley head.
The mountains weep in waterfalls, everywhere,
drenching the faces of the rock.
How will we weep, when these tears have dried ?
Notes on Waterfall
Gaia and connecting to the power of the Earth
How do we connect with the physicality of our environment and what sensations of the body do we feel in connecting to the material presence of the Earth ? This section explores the immersive experience of air, water and gravity. How do we connect with these elements ? To me, swimming is about near as we get to the present and our corporeal place in physical space, this is why my poem ‘Waterfall’ resides here. My Forest bathing Project ‘The Fairy Tale Forest’ - see Series, also fits well, my intention to build community through the experience of this art work, walking in nature.
Mediaeval imagery found in manuscripts and made public on religious buildings, in particular schematically arranged on doorway entrances, represented the link between the universe and the cycles of the Earth’s seasons, connecting the church to daily agrarian routines. Images of hickling and threshing connected seasonal work with the cosmos. Mediaeval communicators used an all-in-one micro to macro infographic using ‘roundels’ to get their message across. In those days to walk into a sacred space, was to have an immersive experience of diving into a portal which explained your existence. This is a reference I bring to my work, arguing we have moved into a new middle ages, with the primacy of image over word in this digital revolution.
In ‘Winter Blossom’ I try to imagine the presence of blossoms out of chime with the seasons. There are themes of melted ice, ice crystals and the pink of the cherry blossom season so beautifully celebrated in Japan. My Earth day series uses gravity as a starting point to create lines and watermarks, I add geometric abstraction to create narratives about the Earth and the beautiful geometry of the universe. At the same time the circle is a sign of human existence, the oldest geometric sign known before Euclid, that we can attribute to the hand of the human race. Obviously, the wheel and many technologies still rely on our capacity to draw this perfect thing with a circumference of 2πR. We repeatedly use of the circle and the sphere to refer to our planet, it seems this motif is still a part of common parlance, the sphere immediately reminds us of the earth and the solar system, especially the moon. It is the circle thats brings us full circle connecting the planet with the humans that dwell here.
More on cosmic waves coming soon….
Reference
Peter Frankopan ‘ The Earth Transformed - an untold History’ Bloomsbury 2023
Jack Hartnell ‘ Mediaeval Bodies- life death and art in the Middle Ages’ Wellcome collection 2018
Sharon Blackie ‘ The Enchanted life’ September Publishing 2018