Suzanne Laidlaw

In this Scruffy Realism of interiors, urban scenes and stage-sets there is a kind of enactment and exchange, and a contestable meaning. Open for interpretation. The paintings leak feeling and messages, yet their relationship to photography is enigmatic. Static instant images are collaged with other elements to become a painted (over time) artwork, taking on an unspecified identity.

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The sources are my photography, internet images, interior design magazines, art photographers’ works (acknowledging their copyright) and the imagination. Mind pictures of sensory experience and feelings, collaged together.

Any artwork is a combination of influences, the artists own past work and the current source, to make a fourth entity – the new painting. The fourth entity is unpredictable, new, fresh and immediate for the artist, and its very unaccountability is brought into a new reality by the viewer. These dream-like narratives reflect the artist’s interests in literature, film, art history and philosophy, touching on issues including feminism, myth, religion and contemporary events. 

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While considering gender from an empathic stance I examine masculinity and femaleness from a feminist and open perspective, recognising gender fluidity, stereotypes and difference.

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My experience as a writer especially of visually oriented short stories informs this work. As an observer of people-scapes in New Zealand or an ambiguous elsewhere, I create people conundrums of contemporary life. My current favourite writers Sally Rooney and Ben Lerner seem to evoke similar observations. Situations, theatres, street scenes, the everyday, and the ‘extra-ordinary” provide a narrative structure for these pictorial events in oil on canvas.