Tomorrow and Time, 2011-2022
oil on canvas
140.0
x 210.0
cm
signed, dated and inscribed with title ‘Susan Norrie/TOMORROW/AND TIME/2011-2022/2022 (on the reverse)
SOLD
Provenance
The artist
Around 2000, Norrie began to make images about human resilience, survival and hope. This was her response to the episodes of environmental and humanitarian catastrophe that she saw re-shaping the delicate ecosystems around us. These concerns took her to Tokyo in 2002 to document the cherry blossom season, which sprung earlier than usual that year.
The image for this work was taken in 2011, as Norrie says "It was Spring and I had the chance to photograph the first blossoming after what is now known as the Great East Japan Earthquake of Friday 11 March 2011....
As with most Japanese Gardens, it is a constructed place - a world where one can contemplate the inner-self as a way of opening up to a bigger picture. In this sense, for me, the Japanese garden is analogous with the magical power of cinema. And film has always informed my painting, both the visceral quality of the medium and the manipulation of time and space... I see film as an extension of painting, a synthesis between image, sound and colour.' (Susan Norrie 2019)
This work combines photographic silkscreen painting, embodying repeated gesture and factory-like labour, and meticulous hand painting. Norrie sees multiple images, fast shutter speeds and ‘many frames per second’ as the basis of image making in our times: a direct reflection of how we absorb the world. Though she was working towards the power of the full series when installed in sequence, her images aren’t multiples. Each is unique and has been scrupulously made. The impossibly thick black stencil has been applied countless times and the hand painting is carefully nuanced.
Norrie’s image belongs to the quick currency of the digital world, yet her meditation on how it is translated back to us, marries the fast and the slow: the quickness of media saturation and the stillness of artistic contemplation.
Image courtesy of the artist