transitional spaces
My work explores how our concept of landscape has changed through technology. The horizon traditionally defined our relationship to the world; now with our expanding perspective, we feel a kinship with microscopic images and aerial views of planets. Vestiges of built environments, architecture, or even graphic design and remnants of popular culture have been added to our visual language and create for us a sense of place. In this context, I consider myself a landscape painter.
I create as a meditation on passageways, life transitions, and the constancy of matter. I am fascinated by the fact that our bodies are quite literally composed of recycled matter from the stars. We are reshuffled molecules. I am constantly surprised by the complexity of our planet and how human activities have impacted it over time. Throughout the last few years of research and travel, my creative practice has focused on the universal and personal process of experiencing presence through absence— a struggle to know a thing from the hole it has left behind after it is gone.
I initiate my paintings with the aid of gravity and evaporation. I work with water media on polymer paper, allowing the pools of water and pigment to settle and form images over time. I am interested in painting as a method of creating an image that references other substances or realities, but also in paint being (or becoming) a thing within itself. Most recently I have gravitated to the juxtaposition of luminous, transparent areas and opaque, flat surfaces to create a sense of space and room to be.
PROJECT NOTES
Sift/Shift
Curated by Amy Chaloupka.
Solo exhibition and site specific installation with sound, July - October, 2023.
Susan Murrell’s works are meditations on passageways, life transitions, and the constancy of matter. Developing elements in her studio over the last year and building an environment in the gallery for eight days, Murrell has created an immersive space for viewers to reflect on our very human proclivity to be co-creators of the landscape. She works with an intuitive visual language that both organizes and contains with grids and borders, while swaths of sand and paint flow in organic rhythms that recall ripples in water and the expanding cosmos. Through these tactile associations, Murrell explores how we assign value to materials, excavate and harvest, delineate, and build. She states “we live in a place where various cultures have long negotiated a beautiful, fertile, and difficult landscape in hopes it will sustain us. I’m interested in how the prevalent philosophies and priorities of our time sculpt the physical environment, and how this place is more porous, interconnected, and transitory than we often realize.”
This exhibition is supported by funds from the Oregon Arts Commission. Additional funding is provided by The Ford Family Foundation and Eastern Oregon University, the Whatcom Museum Foundation and The City of Bellingham.
PROJECT NOTES
Vis Plastica
Part of the exhibition, Nexus of Here, at Wave Contemporary, 2022
The title of this piece, Vis Plastica, was taken from a concept of earth history dating back to Aristotle. It is the theory that the earth possesses a creative force that produces life, that organic beings are created by inorganic matter. This explanation for the origin of life generates such a visceral image for me: the planet’s desire for living beings manifesting particles like seeds in the mud, struggling to sprout. Fossils were believed to be partial or failed examples of this process.
Vis plastica, or “formative force” was a popularly held belief through the middle ages, alongside the ideas that fossils were created by the devil, or alternately God, depending on one’s theology. The sequence of events by which fossils come into existence happens over ten thousand years, a time frame hard for humans to conceive of and impossible for us to witness. I find vis plastica to be a telling example of how our inability to understand very complex phenomena leads to overreaching with a beautiful and bizarre conclusion. We are a species with limits; when faced with enigmatic, puzzling circumstances, we search for an explanation and can sometimes fabricate one that fits our world view. It makes me wonder what we are mistaken about today, what is beyond our current science and understanding, what blanks we are filling in with misguided poetry.
PROJECT NOTES
Flowstone
Collaboration with Hannah Newman
January, 2023
“Your body inhabits the lowest layer of the sky.”
Flowstone, a collaborative project by Hannah Newman and Susan Murrell, explores the end of day as it relates to the end of days. Sunsets, depicted as solitary figures, propagate into a forest or family of stalagmites. The sunset in Flowstone is depicted in multiple ways - as a sculptural figure embedded with sediment, a flat movie-poster double, a cast shadow, and the absence of the form itself. Whether the light show cues a romantic conclusion to the hero’s journey or a pause in the everyday, sunsets hold the promise of endless repetition while evoking nostalgia, beauty, melancholy, and hope.
Murrell and Newman confuse the boundaries of body, land, and sky, intent on scrambling the well-worn territories of landscape painting and figurative sculpture. Through this lens, the artists explore multiplicity in meaning and question the role of perception, personal choice, and over-simplification within expansive issues. In an effort to stave off dread regarding the future state of the world, they play at reimagining an unknown future where expectations have been upended, geologic time prevails and commonalities between flesh, air, and stone abound.
In the neon glow of Flowstone, real and flat spaces collide, landscape becomes figure, and the sunset is both an ending and a beginning.
Hannah Newman is an interdisciplinary artist reuniting digital technologies and experiences with their physical, emotional, and material sources. She has exhibited with galleries, and artist-run spaces across the U.S. and is a co-founder of the collective WAVE Contemporary and a member of the artist-run gallery Carnation Contemporary. Newman received a Master of Fine Arts from Oregon College of Art and Craft and a B.S in Ceramics and Fine Arts from Indiana Wesleyan University. Newman currently teaches as an adjunct professor at Portland State University and serves as the Education and Program Manager at the Oregon Society of Artists in Portland, OR. She looks for spaces, communities and fellow artists with which to build intentional and inclusive culture. Visit her website here to learn more about her work.
Materials
Sunset Shadows (paintings): water media, vinyl, and acrylic paint on polymer paper
Sunset Figures (3D sculptures): foam, wire, cement, pva glue, sand, acrylic paint, obsidian, and coal
Sunset Paperdolls (2D sculptures: watercolor, sign vinyl, and spray paint on plywood
Floor Drawings: colored sand, sign vinyl, charcoal
A Small Mountain in Your Hand: single channel audio, 13:56, Hannah Newman. Sound piece available on Hannah’s website here.
Quote by Amos M. Clifford.
PROJECT NOTES
if water had its way
If water had its way is a meditation on the dynamic relationship between water in all its states, land and culture. Water functions as a sculptor of our planet and the primary component of our bodies, making it a potent symbol in rites of birth, life, and death. As a species, we also spend a good deal of time and energy trying to control it. This painting-centric installation explores inertia and equilibrium as our concept of and role in the landscape continues to shift amid the climate crisis. The title was taken from a passage in Anthony Doerr's book About Grace which motivated the thought experiment: What if water has a sense of agency? And after everything has been undone, what will be left of our urge to undo?
“If water had its way, if geology stopped, the seas would chew up the continents, and rain would wear down the mountains. Water would eventually scour the entire planet into a smooth, definitionless sphere. We’d be left with a single ocean, waist deep, all over the globe. Then, with nothing left to throw itself at, all the divisions and obstacles eroded —no unworn pebbles, no beaches to crash onto, every water molecule touching another— water would disclose, finally, what was in its molecular heart. Would it stand calm and unruffled? Or would it turn on itself—would it throw itself up into storms?”
~Anthony Doerr, About Grace