Elements

2003	Susanna Heron: Elements
Location:	Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick University
Description:	One person exhibition. An installation for the Mead Gallery.
Book	Collier, Caroline; Legg, Helen; Shalgosky, Sarah, and Vickery, Jonathan Susanna Heron: Elements 240 x 17 mm 48pp 15 colour. 10 duotone Mead Gallery, The University of Warwick, Coventry 2003 Design Pippa Parris ISBN 0 902683 64 8 Distributor Cornerhouse

 

Extract from the book. Essay by Caroline Collier

I understand, incompletely, that there are ninety-two naturally occurring elements classified in the periodic table, substances that cannot be subdivided by chemical methods. More familiar are Aristotle’s elements of earth, air, fire and water that he declared were acted on by two forces alone: gravity (the heaviness of earth and water) and levity (the lightness of air and fire). Susanna Heron’s particular humour or temperament, being made up of who knows which recipe of constituent parts, encompasses apparently opposite pulls. There is gravitas as well as a sort of self- deprecating sense of absurdity in her make up as an artist.

Theories are models, plans, principles. Since the late 1960s, Susanna Heron, like many artists born before and after her, has set up systems or principles as starting points. Self-imposed rules have allowed for improvisation and, ultimately, surprise. She has carried out a distinctive practice that has involved defining rules of engagement and then expanding them. Amongst the influences on her recent work she cites a rather technical book on the plants of New Zealand.1 The text sets out how plants adapt to particular conditions, on islands far from continental land masses. This book may partly have attracted her as a gardener thinking about plants able to withstand the wind and exposed conditions at Eagles Nest, the place near Zennor on the southernmost tip of Cornwall where she was brought up and where she continues to return. Perhaps her preoccupation with elements, essences, variation and adaptation found a correspondence in this book. And, in her working methods as an artist, she has made a virtue of given situations, of turning constraints to account. She sees expediency as linked to the creative process.

Creative actions may be preceded by a period where influences and echoes are emptied out, banished from the mind, a process that has something of the quality of spiritual preparation. In Susanna’s case, the first influence to put to one side was that of her more famous father Patrick, the painter of colour drenched ‘wobbly hard edge’ paintings and an effective writer on art. Perhaps she would agree with him that a work of art, once finished, can exceed or defy the intention of the artist. In an article written in 1955, when Susanna was six, Patrick Heron wrote: “Art is literally an act of discovery. Art reveals aspects of reality we have never consciously known before”2. She has said of her photographs taken in the late eighties in the garden of Eagles Nest, “I saw one thing and was given something else”3 and of the recent drawings for the series Elements “I make something and then ask what it is”4. In this approach Susanna has an affinity with the attitude to invention of some Modernists. As the composer John Cage put it: “An experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen”5.

Despite her desire to experiment, her willingness to collaborate with others and to extend the boundaries of her own practice, Susanna Heron’s career appears to have been dogged by unwelcome classifications as well as by family ghosts. Let us begin with a short, unfashionably linear narrative. First she was a jeweller (this, at any rate differentiated her from her father). In her teens she started an evening class in jewellery and at the age of seventeen she exhibited in a group show at the Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford, on the recommendation of the artist Breon O’Casey, who taught the evening class. By the time that she went to Central School of Art and Design in the late sixties she had already participated in a few successful exhibitions, including three at Arnolfini, Bristol, where there was a lively jewellery programme. She made pieces in silver and resin and fairly soon became disaffected by the art school, where plastic was considered an unworthy material. In the spirit of the 1960s, Susanna was interested in jewellery as a way of making work that was accessible and unpretentious, something to be used in everyday life. Her complete abandonment of precious materials after leaving the college, was an attempt, with other jewellers at the time, to reach a wider public and to expand the concept of jewellery. This belief in her practice as a part of life and the concern for the application of art to different situations, beyond the gallery and the art world, has persisted in the more recent public works.

The jewellery used the human body as a starting point: the dimensions and properties of the body set the rules, as a site may set the conditions for the large- scale works. But jewellery, at least as she sees it, is functional: the rules can only be extended to a certain point, beyond which jewellery becomes unwearable. And unwearable jewellery is not art. The difference between jewellery (or craft or design or architecture) is important in Susanna’s practice. When she came upon Donald Judd’s book Architektur in the late 80s the following passage affirmed her own thinking, reflected in her practice: “the configuration and the scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture. The intent of art is different from that of the latter, which must be functional. If a chair or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous. The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair…. The art in art is partly the assertion of someone’s interest regardless of other considerations. A work of art exists as itself; a chair exists as a chair itself. And the idea of a chair isn’t a chair.”6

In 1978 Susanna Heron took up a British Council Bicentennial Arts Fellowship to the United States, where she travelled with her then husband, the artist David Ward, spending time in New York. The Fellowship was intended as a time for the re-examination of her ideas and methods. In New York in the late seventies, she and David Ward were most interested in photography, film and performance. Susanna also saw Sol le Witt’s pencil drawings on the walls of a sequence of rooms and was astounded by their simplicity, their adherence to rule and the allowance for chance and what she recalls as their ‘environmental beauty’7. She met the artist Judith Shea in New York who, as Susanna puts it, was ‘crossing over’ from a craft or design practice to sculpture. Judith Shea had trained in tailoring and was also involved in performance.

In America Susanna developed a working method based on thrift, setting up a temporary workshop and using cardboard or plastic sheets to make prototypes. In her jewellery before this point, her experiments had been primarily formal, concerning scale, transparency and translucence of the material and relationships between the geometry of the body as determining what could be worn by it. She now found that the logical extension of what had begun as an object whose purpose was to be worn should exist only as idea, afterlife or photograph. Of a cardboard spiral made at this time she said: ”It describes the body, head and shoulders in particular. It can be worn but it is obviously not practical to move – it is not very interesting when it is not worn - the conclusion was to photograph it and to forget about the spiral as an object”8. The groups of photographs made by Susanna Heron and David Ward in New York that recall images by Man Ray, use the spirals, as well as light projections and reflection. The reflective properties of materials, the behaviour of light and the play on space and image, substance and shadow all run through her practice. In the catalogue for Susanna’s Bodywork exhibition held at the Crafts Council Gallery in 1980, David Ward described the collaborative photographs as ‘stills from a performance’. She was to use the term ‘stills’ in the book on her publicly sited sculpture, again referring to time and its relation to film.

Shortly after her return to London, Susanna started to teach on the Foundation course at Middlesex Polytechnic (now Middlesex University). Here, researching in the college library, she ‘discovered’ artists such as Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, Claus Oldenberg, Jannis Kounnellis, and Joseph Beuys. All of these were important to her and expanded her thinking. Her work at this time took the concept of wearing as subject. By way of contrast with some pieces that she made which could not be worn, she made a group of pieces she termed ‘wearables’. There were discs recalling hats, sometimes with rude tongues and impolite ties and openings, the method of their construction, or birth, disconcertingly on view. Some of the larger ones were shown with photographs demonstrating how they might be worn. The essence of a wide brimmed hat is a trigger for recollections of glamour and cinema - of the dressing up box of childhood. Susanna’s elemental, residual hats also had disreputable, humorous echoes of less pristine aspects of bodily existence and of play. In one image of a piece being worn, a view from the back of a figure, a blue disc on the head signals a demure adult, a ‘lady’, well presented to society. At the centre of the disc, however, is a red tongue, stuck out at the world as if by a defiant child or, perhaps, an intimation of something private, exposed unwittingly by the wearer, who cannot see this labial tongue. In either interpretation, vulnerability is evoked.

At this point, in the early eighties, Susanna put to one side her starting point for making work for sixteen years, the human body as armature. She was no longer making the jewellery of her definition, but engaged herself in a different kind of practice, one where, perhaps, she could assert her interests, regardless of other considerations, to paraphrase Judd’s remark on art. The first sculptures she made continued the theme of the head: some head-like forms were placed in clusters on the floor. Her previous work had needed the body for structure, these sculptures, often arranged in groups, clung to the floor or the walls. Frieze, 1994/95, was shown in her first sculpture exhibition in 1985 in the New Gallery at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, used in this period rather as Tate Britain displays groups of works by up and coming artists in a particular room. It consisted of an array of circular objects and cones, cast from plaster moulds and gilded with aluminium leaf, hung in a line high up on a blank wall. In the catalogue of the Whitechapel show, Lynne Cooke noted that the silvery, reflective surface of the line of hat-like objects, responsive to changing light, and the ‘skieing’ of the frieze ‘makes the spectator very conscious of his or her position’9. As a sculptor, with Frieze, Susanna was not so much making discrete objects, as manipulating a sense of the experience of a space, introducing, in a specific way, a sequence of elements to an architectural space. A group of works made after the Whitechapel exhibition was concerned even more directly with defining the scale of certain spaces - an imaginary plane in the Ikon Gallery (8x8x8, 1986) or a tall, top lit room (Coil, Arm Piece, 1987). In both cases, objects placed on the floor are set off by slender perpendicular forms, poles that define the proportions of the gallery.

Severe frosts in 1987 ravaged the extraordinary garden on the edge of the moor and the sea that Susanna’s mother had tended from 1955, when the family moved to Eagles Nest, until her death in 1979. After the freak frost, Susanna, at her father’s request, worked on the regeneration of the garden she identified with her mother, photographing it between 1988 and 1991. At this time she created the drawings and bronze sculptures that were shown at Camden Arts Centre in 1989. She described this work in her book Shima (a Japanese word for island and garden, with a sense of boundary and containment), a book dedicated to her mother. “In the garden it was hard to know what was alive and away from it I began to work on a series of bronze sculptures, working directly in the wax that creates the mould. They concern things unseen, buried, underground, internal, subconscious; involving sources of energy, generators, messengers, nerves and roots”10. For the show at Camden, Susanna made cool bench or table – like plinths for the uncomfortable, organic forms resembling wombs, brains and other fleshy clusters, roots, tubers, receptacles and internal forms and organs that in one instance (Spoon, 1988) recalled a household utensil as well. To make the gallery space more intimate, more domestic, she lowered the ceiling height. Her response to given situations is to adapt them. An interest in the artist’s control – or lack of control- of the environment and even of the work, has persisted.

Gardeners work with given conditions (climate, soil type, site) and they always know that their efforts may be destroyed by those same conditions. Ian Hamilton Finlay, a gardener artist, has described this paradox: “Weather is the chief content of gardens; yet it is the one thing in them over which the gardener has no control”11. The garden at Eagles Nest allows for a strategy of calculated risk. It is planted with the weather in mind and with the knowledge that not only will the nature of the growth of plants be determined by wind (their scale and form) but that hard frosts, rare in this part of England, will kill tender, exotic plants that may have survived for many decades. The garden is planted to take care of itself and the strategy ‘deals with risk and allows for change’12. Susanna appears to have taken this gardening strategy of ‘a calculated degree of chance’ and to have applied it to the practice of art.

Out of this time of burial and excavation, both personal and literal, came the first slate engravings, the drawings engraved on slate like the diagrammatic trajectory of molten bronze, the growth of a root or water moving underground. There is also a concentration on black and white, light and shadow, moonlight and sunlight in the charcoal drawings on paper that precede the current Elements. If her father focussed on colour, she would make an art devoid of colour yet still redolent of a place of intense, changing light and startling colour. They shared a strong influence, in the landscape around Eagles Nest; but her experience of it is distinct. The severity of the landscape could be apprehended without colour and the Cornish peninsula could even be read like the ambiguous place, a sort of underworld, in Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said, with its stones white under moonlight, where the footprints left by a black form are erased by a fall of snow.13

The 1980s, it will be recalled, was the decade in Britain when ‘objects and sculpture’ were to the fore. Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Alison Wilding, Bill Woodrow and others whose work emerged in that context are Susanna’s contemporaries; but her training and experience had been quite different from that of these sculptors. Although neither the Whitechapel nor the Camden shows were much noticed by critics, she had begun to make a new setting for herself as a sculptor. In 1992 her exhibition at the Newlyn Art Gallery looked quite different; but in formal terms it recalled the earlier experiments with space such as 8x8x8. At Newlyn she made an installation within the gallery: engraved slates, leaning against the walls and on the floor. The slate engravings are sensitive to changing circumstances of light and shadow, as a landscape is. The Horizontal Slate, placed on the floor of the gallery, is seen by Susanna as a ‘key work’. It relates to the Shima book and to the structure of the garden at Eagles Nest, with its circular paths. She considers the experience of looking at the Horizontal Slate as “like looking into a pool or looking through a telescope into the depth of outer space, or discovering something through a microscope. Also the centre is empty, a vacuum”14. At the centre may be a vacuum or a point of stillness, like the little pool in the rock at Eagles Nest described in Shima ‘a little gravel lying irresistibly under clear water’15.

The Newlyn exhibition led to her first public commission for the building of the Council of the European Union, Brussels (Slate Frieze, 1994/5). Here she made an immensely long drawing on slate panels, a frieze of 21 metres, which seemed to take Klee’s over quoted but beautiful idea of taking a line for a walk and turned it into a physical walk. She makes a route, allowing the spectator to engage on his or her own terms with the experience of the space within and around the Slate Frieze, perhaps her most apparently monumental work. In the 1990s Susanna Heron became known for works termed as public art and for collaborations with architects. She felt “I had found a new medium, I realised I had an accurate sense of space – I believe through the experience of working with the complex space of Eagles Nest garden and the knowledge of the human scale”16. Nevertheless, in terms of critical reception of her work, the direction of her career has been problematic. For a serious artist to be known as a jeweller may, in some circles, be considered unfortunate. In a single career to become a ‘public artist’ as well seems not to be misfortune as much as perversity. Susanna Heron’s independence is one of her strengths and has allowed her to carry on an internal debate, expressed eloquently in her work, about the specific nature of different kinds of art and design practice and of the application of art, as distinct from craft, or applied art, to various situations.

The public commissions for Brussels and, in the same period, for the British Embassy in Dublin, are at once beautiful, intricate and dependent on fleeting atmospheric effects and intuitive or subconscious connections and associations for their meaning. In the preface of the book Stills from Sculpture (published in1999, documenting her commissioned works) Susanna writes, apparently rather eccentrically, about the weather:

“In the countryside the weather is of primary importance. Every morning you look at the light over the horizon and at the colour of the plants to see what the day will bring. You sniff the air for humidity and examine the sky. It dictates your clothing and you make a decision to risk getting wet or cold or sunburnt and whether you will wear Wellington boots or a hat. If that day you stay indoors then from time to time you listen to the wind and glimpse the sun for a moment fleeting across your view and into the room. You feel the weather changing and close the window until it is calm. Walking out from the house you choose your path carefully, the landscape unravelling ahead and underfoot. Walk into the sun and it will be behind you when you return, the light and topographical sequence reversed.”17

She is a sort of land artist: a land artist intent on bringing about thought through experience in the senses. There is an awkwardness in the way she attempts to convey an ‘ordinariness’ in her perception of her world. In her effort to make herself seem like you and me, she sets herself apart. In this book she speaks of placing works of art in spaces where they will be happened upon, or where they may be subject to forces uncontrolled, to be rained upon and blustered by wind, metaphorical and actual. She shows elegant photographs of the Dublin work Island of 1994/5, the slate engraving transformed by rain, or an elliptical form submerged in water, the surface animated by reflections. The work is in three movements and she suggests that it may be read as a series of details rather than all at once, as a ‘whole’. There is a multiplicity of layers and elements that she has described as ”a preoccupation in combining/animating ‘image’ with real – eg real water/drawing of water/effect of the engraving on water/water in the formulation of the slate/the growth pattern of the tree reflected in the drawing of the flow of water over which water runs”18.

In recent works (such as Side Street, a work in progress, and 36 Elements, Glass Wall Tokyo, 2002) she seeks to bring aspects of the natural world, the landscape, into a controlled, indoor, environment. In making an enclosed landscape she is choosing to take on, perhaps, Baudrillard’s hellish, hermetic shopping centre of ‘perpetual springtime’19, where weather has been abolished. Can she be aiming to restore, in these settings, a kind of intimacy; a humanity of lived, direct, bodily or embodied experience? Is there a naivety in setting up in such places visual events that work, first, on the level of the senses and then metaphorically? There is danger. ‘Nature’ becomes a tree enclosed in an atmospherically controlled atrium, as art ‘features’ too may become subsumed and powerless to act on alien, consumerist worlds. A corporate building at Tokyo station is a far cry from a Tuscan chapel as a setting for art. In creating a street or alleyway, where variations on the Elements drawings will be engraved on very large slate panels, she is taking to an extreme the desire to influence the situation in which the work of art is seen. Yet there is the recognition that the work is subject to all sorts of variables, from the way natural light enters and falls on the slate engravings, to reflections, shadows and the multiple viewpoints of those using the alleyway. At the same time she is risking disbanding any boundaries between the ‘work’, as a discrete object and the setting for it, a particular preoccupation of hers.

Her site specific, performative (and time based) art is, possibly, illuminated by the philosopher Michel de Certeau’s linguistic conception of place: ”Space is a practiced place. Thus the street, geometrically defined by urban planning, is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, ie a place constituted by a system of signs”20. Susanna’s signs are physical – the play of light and shadow, details as triggers for the perception of an intense moment. Her signs are not primarily symbolic although they may be more like Blake’s via Milton (a shaft of light) than they are akin to semiotics. Structuralist film, however, is important to her. Although her roots are partly in the avant garde of the sixties and the seventies, she became particularly interested in film later on, in the eighties. Her interests in material (and specifically in properties relating to film, those of light and time) and her delight in predetermination, through rules, and in chance, through the unpredictability of doing, make film an important route into her thought processes. And it was a film, the original 1921 black and white film of Slat Dance by Oskar Schlemmer, Master of the Bauhaus Theatre Workshop, that had inspired her own practice in the late sixties. Schlemmer’s interest in ‘ambulant’ space may also be related to Susanna’s public works, which depend on the cumulative experience of a particular time and place, of incidental details, like a walk in the country. If all her work is concerned with physical experience, her jewellery took the concept of geometric forms and related them to the structure of the body, while her most recent works in indoor environments explore the idea of architectural space, as El Lissitsky put it, ’to be lived in’21. In both cases scale, that is, the relation between elements, is critical.

In a photograph of the quarry she uses for her slate panels, taken by Susanna, you see at the top a thin layer of earth and then a fringe of delicate trees against the sky. At the foot of the quarry there are pools of water reflecting the exposed slate cliff, with its sheer, water streaked face, like that in James Ward’s painting Gordale Scar. The works using slate always tend to refer to water, either in pools or springs or waterfalls and to use the reflective properties of water. In Island, an outdoor place, part courtyard, part landscape, is created. This might be a place for a conversation or a meeting, where chance incidents occur. The Sunken Courtyard in Hackney (1995/7) again creates a meeting place, a space derived from Italian Renaissance painting, with its blue wall echoing the ‘blue space’, void or ‘nowhere’ used to isolate film shots when figures are to be removed from their setting and transferred to another filmic world. The work planned for Coventry takes the perception of water emerging from underground to make a setting for a noisy window pane of falling water, where the sound will be integral to the experience of the place. These works are all settings for happenings, never complete; but caught at particular moments. They are concerned with process and processes. The work exists in a dual reality, in physical form and in the train of associations and events that may be set off by it.

The 36 Elements began in 2001 as a series of 36 black ink drawings on white paper. They were made in response to a commission for the Marunouchi Building at Tokyo Station. Susanna was already interested in Japan, in its gardens and in screens and wall paintings as integrated within architectural spaces, not to mention its influence on western Modernism. In the odd little book In Praise of Shadows by the novelist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, written in 1933, he states that for him: “beauty is not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness that one thing against another creates”22. For Susanna too the substance, the material thing itself, is only an aspect of the more interesting play of reflections, shadows, implicit meanings and internal relationships. It is not surprising that she was attracted to a culture that values the fleeting.

The Elements drawings are plans or cartoons, ‘generative things’, prototypes that can be made much smaller or much larger than their starting point. They were conceived to be etched and sandblasted onto glass panels within a transparent wall 14.5 metres square with water at its foot, like the slate quarry. Drawings for the panels were made at half scale. In a talk for a discussion on art and architecture held at Tate Britain in 2002 she explained how the images might work: ”(they) will float through the space and catch the light and they will cast shadows on the people travelling up the escalators. The shapes result from a drawing process – in a way they are like found objects”23. Her film of the project installed shows the way light falls, projecting shadows, reflections and refractions in space and on and out of the water. The work exists as a multilayered, transparent, immersive space to be experienced, in time, as you move past the wall and through the building: “people travel past it on escalators and look through it to the tops of trees, it is an artificial, living garden”24. She has set up an equivalent of the elements as experienced in a landscape but in a hermetic, controlled, indoor world, an artifice that acts as a prompt, in the senses, to the memory of being in landscape.

The black ink drawings look like sections of tissue, seeds, leaves, cells, bacteria under a microscope, cogs, frog spawn, the cluster of balloons in a Brassai photograph, wasps’ nests, pastry, or matter - rolled out thin, the earth or solar system seen from space. What the drawings resemble is not really the point, although the reference to things invisible to the human eye because so small or so vast may be important. The microscope, the telescope and the camera are all extensions of the eye, allowing us to see things hidden, inward, remote, otherwise missed. The almost universal appeal of the revelation of the inter-relatedness of natural structures, from the veins on a moth’s wing to the flow of a river delta seen from space, is satirised by the artist David Shrigley in a drawing showing why microscopes make things ‘boring’ (because they all look the same or because hidden things are revealed?) But invisible connections at vastly differing scales attract Susanna because she is attuned to difference not sameness in the application of essential structures to different situations. The Elements drawings as plans are in a sense metaphors for scale and for time (the other dimension of space). Like mathematical systems, they are elements, essences, reproducible at any size. They can be used in the building in Tokyo, in a London street, on the walls of a gallery or as tiny prints. The found objects are transportable; but the experience of the works is specific, rooted in a particular time and place.

Experimenting with rules and methods of control and disruption, Susanna Heron has placed her work in uncontrolled environments – in a corner of a city or in someone else’s office building (to be happened upon) and she has made explicit this lack of control by seeking to determine places not for autonomous works of art but settings for visual events, where variation is inevitable. In Side Street, the apparent whole may only set up the conditions for the experience of a particular aspect of the work, or for an accumulative experience of details, never read precisely the same way again. The interest in ‘substance’ as a trigger for multiple readings of the work may link her to aspects of Minimalism and, of course to the desire of artists older than herself to move out of the gallery, working in the landscape or the street or with performance and film. She can also be considered in relation to a younger artist such as Liam Gillick, who has taken pleasure in the provisional and the oblique and who has been attracted to designs and plans and the application of art to various actual and hypothetical situations. But if his work and that of other artists of his generation and younger may collapse boundaries between different forms and genres, Susanna, in the manner of Judd, is scrupulous in defining the particularities of art. It may be that Susanna Heron’s practice will be better understood in a critical climate that is more familiar with serious contemporary artists who choose to work in a range of situations, unbounded by irrelevant concerns about whether painting, sculpture, video, photography or any other medium is of greater or lesser significance and where the definition of ‘the work’ itself is more elastic. Specific media and particular contexts are of course different from each other but whether a ‘painter’ is to be taken more seriously than a ‘photographer’ for instance is, luckily, no longer a debate. But it was a live issue, incredibly enough, in the seventies in England.

In bringing Elements into the Mead Gallery, after their use in Tokyo and in Side Street, Susanna takes the concept of control and its absence and applies it to the purposeful, contemplative space of the gallery. This is her first gallery exhibition for a decade. Here you do not happen upon the work of art as you pass through on your way somewhere else. You enter the space expressly for the art. What happens when you appear to see something as immediate and simple as an enormous black shape on a white wall? Is the visual event instantaneous or slow to give up its meaning? Will you pause or pass swiftly through and out again, thinking you know instantly what you have seen?

On her way to Tokyo for a final site visit in August 2002, Susanna bought a new CD of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue with notes by the music journalist and musician Bill Evans that had appeared with the original 1959 LP. As part of her system in setting the conditions for making the Elements drawings she had listened repeatedly to Kind of Blue but she had not seen the Bill Evans text before. As she read his notes on the plane she felt that the process of making her drawings was being described: ”There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush with black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere … this conviction that the direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician.”25

Susanna Heron relishes such coincidences and chance connections. It is as if they affirm an inward, intuitive process, underlining the mysterious point of art: to bring into being perceptions of a reality far more significant than the intention of the artist before embarking on the ‘direct deed’ of making art. In the book Stills from Sculpture she describes witnessing two men in conversation by her piece Island in Dublin. They were referring to Finnegan’s Wake. When Susanna looked up James Joyce’s book, recalling her father reading it to her when she was a child, she found the names of numerous rivers embedded in the text. The direct communication through her work to these Dubliners in the 1990s of this unconscious, buried allusion, the link with her own preoccupation with subterranean rivers and the entanglement of meanings in the City of Dublin gave her particular pleasure. Her work had exceeded her expectations for it, taking on a life integral to the place, becoming, as de Certeau put it ‘transformed into a space’, in this case by a conversation that picked up on a hidden meaning, latent in the work and specific to Dublin.

Susanna Heron’s strength lies in her singular, awkward, exploration of the constitution of works of art and the distinctions between art, craft, architecture and design. She has analysed with originality the relationship in art between the object and the potential for unpredictable ’visual events’ that happen later and are never repeated. In this her perception of sculpture is as live event, as process, always in the present and with the potential to be ignored, the meaning left dormant. Shadow and reflection are as vital as matter, chance more valid than prescription. Her independent combination of seriousness and wit has allowed her to make a body of work not confined by conventions or hierarchies but working in between or underneath them to disrupt notions of the obviously monumental and to put across the values of accumulation, of small details, apparent co-incidences and the fleeting instant:

Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything) 26

Caroline Collier
October 2002

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