Susan Stevenson


Landscape is a recurring element in my work. Whether examining Australia’s colonial history, climate change or cultural conflict, the depiction of landscape has underpinned my practice. Often demanding a dual reading of the work, it has taken different forms over the years.

Increasingly abstract and minimal, my current work can be read as landscape or interior space. Fields of colour and texture are scarred by human gesture; fractures can be read as the flaws in an interior wall or an aerial view of a crumbling edifice. With both readings there is a sense of impermanence and transience.

The recent paintings are all acrylic on linen; the depth in the work is created through applying seemingly endless layers of very thin colour on a black base.

Click here for artwork by Susan Stevenson

Exhibitions at Tacit include:

 

2024 Ghosts in the Cement, Tacit Art, Melbourne

Travelling in Europe last year, I was struck by the soft beauty in the weathered plaster of ancient buildings. The depth of colour and texture in the peeling paint and uneven plasterwork reminded me of aerial photographs of central Australia with cracks from shifting brickwork, blocked windows and forgotten doorways echoing the straight lines and random right angles of European settler land distribution. In the Australian context, however, these lines are no longer just poignant reminders of small lives passing across thresholds and generations. Boundary fences and minor roads have become earthworks visible from the air, supplanting natural landforms as defining features of the continent.

 

2021 After Life

No, the cockroaches didn’t inherit the earth – nothing inherited the earth. Under chemical skies, an eerie beauty with no witnesses and no future. 

 

2018 Invisible Country

Imagined, remembered and mythic – in the corners of our collective and personal memories, images from the vast space of inland Australia inform our national identity. In that flat open country, scale and distance are impossible to calculate and the human presence is inconsequential. The horizon is the only certain visual reference and even that throws up mirages – shimmering deceptively with the dashed hope of an inland sea. Susan Stevenson’s paintings in Invisible Country reduce the landscape to blocks of colour using acrylic, oil pastels and lead pencil.

 

Exhibitions

solo
2024 Ghosts in the Cement, Tacit Art, Melbourne
2022 Found, WantingGallery550 Melbourne
Found, Wanting, Duckrabbit  Sydney 
2021 After Life, Tacit Art, Melbourne 
2018 Invisible Country, Tacit Art, Melbourne
2015 History Wars, Studio Show, Melbourne
2012 White Women’s Business, Purgatory Gallery, Melbourne
2005 My Grandmothers’ Furs, Dickerson Gallery, Melbourne
1991 Susan Stevenson, Canalot Studios, London 
1990 Susan Stevenson, Alternative Arts, London 

group 
2023 SUBSTRATE 23, Tacit Art, Melbourne
Urban Campfire, Gallery550, Melbourne
2022 SUBSTRATE 22, Tacit Art, Melbourne
2021 National Capital Art Prize, Canberra
2020 20[2020], Tacit Art, Melbourne
2019 John Villiers Outback Art Prize, Winton, Queensland
2018 Group, Sunshine Print Artspace, Melbourne
2014 WOB Prize, Tap Gallery, Sydney
2013 Belle Arte Prize, Chapman & Bailey, Melbourne
2012 Belle Arte Prize, Chapman & Bailey, Melbourne
2011 The Flanagan Art Prize, Ballarat
2010 Dahlia Eaglehawk Prize, Bendigo
2009 40x40x40, Dickerson Gallery, Melbourne