Susan Norrie

Tomorrow, 2011-2025
oil on canvas
140.0 x 210.0 cm
signed, dated and inscribed with title ‘Susan Norrie/TOMORROW/2011-2025’ (on the reverse)

View extended notes

Provenance
The artist

Tomorrow one of a series of paintings I have been working on since 2012, merges a reprographic silkscreen technique with labour-intensive brush work. This method of layering oil painting over the screen-printed image - the focus of my recent work - incorporates photographs taken in 2011 during the blossom season in Tokyo.

It was a response to the Great East Earthquake, the impact of which was ongoing when I was in Japan to install Transit, a single-channel video project commissioned for the Yokohama Triennale 2011. Post-Fukushima, there was a pervasive fear that perhaps radioactive fallout would impact upon the forthcoming blossom season; perhaps the toxic turmoil would interrupt the natural cycle that plays a significance role in
Japanese society.

The screen-and-layer painting technique I have developed over recent years is an attempt to encapsulate experiential photographic qualities: exposure, time-lapse, depth-of-field and optical/ illusionary dimensions
that blur aspects associated with aperture control to imbue the image with poignancy... to reveal possible poetic, metaphoric readings.

The ongoing Blossom series can be considered a meditation on the fleeting aspects of light and time and place (the photographic) and the desire to suspend that moment into something seemingly permanent and profound... a reminder of the flux associated with changing seasons, the cyclical nature of the human predicament. The title of this work Tomorrow is intentionally ambiguous: which tomorrow? It suggests a day after today or time forever coming.

In this sense, the Blossom series confined to either black-and-white depictions (‘skeletal, forensic and X-ray like’) or images blushed with shades of cherry pink (‘resilient and hopeful’), represent an ever-changing landscape captured sometimes as a solitary bough or a cluster of flowering branches drooping over water.

The enduring blossom tree for Japanese and tourists alike becomes a touch stone of beauty: as much as it stands as a guardian of Spring, each tree is equally a sentinel... a reminder of precious time passing.

Susan Norrie
June 2025

Image courtesy of the artist

View artist profile

☆ Add to wishlist

Susan Norrie's preoccupation with politics and the environment have
always informed the subject matter of her work. From the feminist overtones of
her earlier series 'Lavished Living', (1983-1984) and 'Objet D'Art' (1988), to
her comments on consumerism found in her series 'Tall Tales and True'
(1986-1987) and 'Peripherique' (1989), or to the more recent video works
'Undertow' (2002) and the geologically and politically volatile view of
Indonesia documented in 'Havoc', seen at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Norrie’s
diverse oeuvre is challenging and, at times, polemical in its honest
deconstruction of modern society.

After studying painting at the National Art School, Sydney and the National
Gallery School, Melbourne in the 1970s, Norrie began creating films and
installation pieces in the mid-1990s; works that blur the line between art and documentary.
The beauty of Norrie’s works – whether it be painting, drawing, installation or
video – is Norrie's control of media and materiality. The tactile quality of
her surfaces are often a contradictory experience to the harsh reality of the
stories she tells.

From the moment Norrie began exhibiting in 1982, her work has been
highly regarded for being both conceptually and materially advanced. In 1987, she
won the first Moet & Chandon prize for an artist under 35, which became a
pivotal point in her career. Since then, she has held residencies at Greene
Street Studio, New York, and in New Zealand and Germany. She received the 1997
Seppelt Prize, Contemporary Art Award, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. In
1999 she received an Australia Council Fellowship, and in 2004 she received an
APA Scholarship for PhD Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Norrie’s work has been exhibited in many international and national
surveys of contemporary art. She represented Australia at the 2007 Venice
Biennale, and has been in important group shows including the Montreal Biennale (2015); the Biennale of Sydney (2014, 2004); the Yokohama Triennale (2011); In the Balance: Art for a Changing World,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2010); and Figuring Landscapes, Tate Modern, London (2008). Norrie's work has been written on extensively and is held in all state and most regional gallery
collections of Australia, as well as in the Auckland City Art Gallery and the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.