Susan Chrysler White “Mother Tongue”
“My recent paintings strive to represent interior experience and its transitory connections among ideas and emotional states. There is a basic human tendency to seek order in the current of experience in which we are constantly swimming. There is a variety of languages (scientific, artistic, and spiritual, as well as ordinary discursive) by which we attempt to organize our worlds, and they frequently borrow from one another–thus the richness of metaphor. This new body of work also presses further into the exploration of the boundaries between the decorative impulse and the darker, emotional, philosophical sources.
I continue to mine the resources I have accumulated through living in different cultures for much of my life. Growing up in Spain with ornate Arabic filigree at home and in the city around me; my time working in India; living on and off in central Mexico where my parents were based; and teaching in Tyler in Rome with regular access to the Vatican Museum-- all these experiences have influenced me deeply. In these cultures, as well as our own, I am drawn to the vast range of visual forms employed in all manifestations of display, particularly the altar.
Bilateral symmetry with its reference to the body plays a main role in my new work. Having explored that in much of my earlier work, I return to it as the work becomes more specifically personal. The longing for spiritual and physical connections, the playfulness of my granddaughter’s obsession with train horns and my love of cosmological charts are all woven into my desire to make images.
My pieces are constructed by accumulating layers of acrylic paint on transparent glassine paper. I cut these laminations of glassine and collage them on canvas and paper. My process is one of squeezing paint from bottles onto glassine and laying it out to dry throughout the studio before I begin the process of collecting and arranging the fragments to form a visual narrative. These elements can appear at first glance to be mechanically generated-–I am interested in this tension between appearance and process in the work. It somehow speaks to our human condition and our recognition of ourselves.”
---Susan Chrysler White
Press release / artist statement and images via Wege Center for the Arts
