Susan Wald - The Gathering - Monotypes

Wednesday 7 - Sunday 25 May 2025

Click here for artwork by Susan Wald

These monotypes were made as a response to the paintings in my previous exhibition at Tacit, The Gathering. Their essence is drawing, the core of all my work.

It’s how I bear witness and make sense of my subject, myself and the world around me. I wanted to give these animal skulls a new life; to find and create new meaning that is a continuum of their painted history.

They arouse in me questions of life and death, and through this process I have been confronted with both the seriousness and the light, the land and storytelling.

Essay by Lenore Manderson AM to accompany March 2024 exhibition The Gathering

Susan Wald’s luminous canvases, with their distinctive foreground assemblies, invite storying. In each scene, the assemblies become animated; the players take on disposition and purpose. They herd together, their eyes on the interloper; gaining safety in numbers.

Sometimes, humanoid, they converse - convivial guests around a dining table. Other times, they form a conga line, dancing along an infinity loop across canvases. The images lure us to find a narrative despite their subject matter.

For the models of these players are bleached skulls of animals, vestiges salvaged from beaches, roadsides and deserts - goats, a sheep, kangaroos and wallaroos, a fox, a dog. For one, there’s a weathered fragment of spine; for the rest, no clues, no shards of former lives. The little heads suggest powerlessness, counter to their likely past lives. The goats’ horns suggest authority. This is haunting. Globally, we are witnesses to the menace of such hubris and horn-locks.

It’s a mark of brilliance that Wald can paint such scenes of vitality and sociability from the configuration of skulls. She conjures life in its absence: the eyes of these players sparkle, they engage with each other and with us. They settle in landscapes of vivid and shimmering hue - apricot, mango, coral, musk, magenta - colours of the rising and setting of the sun - and opalescent aqua, the colour of the morning sky once the sun is up. Yet these colours are not of the sky but of earth; rich shadows ground these gatherings.

The artist has often depicted broody, mournful and desolate works. Consider her paintings of abattoirs and crows, and the majestic barrenness of a sandy landscape, and how these all reference grim histories, orthodox violence, and suffering. In an oeuvre of decades, her oil paintings and works on paper capture the beauty in the abject, as much as they speak of neglect, denial and long tails of sadness. With brilliant brush work, precise representation and an unexpected thoughtful palette, in all these paintings she configures narratives of human culpability and resilience.

And now, from the trace of death, she paints the living back, subverting what we might call still life. For with their animation, the skulls still live; vibrant and spirited, they populate our imagination. These paintings are an invitation to dream of a world that is otherwise and to find inspiration in doing so.