Suzanne Laidlaw

These collages of abstract and figurative elements are small social playing fields. Fabrics, felt and watercolour on Arches paper, cut out as paper dolls and abstract silhouettes  and placed in taut spatial relationships on Lithuanian Fog linen teatowels. Make-up, configure, arrange and re-arrange. Tenuously feeding on dreams, on half-baked ideas and unforeseen connections. Hints not of dystopia or utopia but a gritty realism like a Beckett play without words, hanging in mid-air like so many visual fragments blown into rough weather and then glued down.

 

The collages act as vehicles of memory and imagination like the memory of playing cutout dolls, Barbie dolls and pulling on, pulling off dolls clothes. Story telling in short stories, in the newspaper, in conversation, and snippets of these recollected. Experiences just hinted at, something happening off stage, an aftermath to a witnessed event.