ROAD TO SOMEWHERE

Devonport Regional Gallery, Tasmania. December 12, 2020 - January 24, 2021

EXHIBITION ESSAY

If you turn off the highway and take the backroads in-land from the coast, in no
time at all you will be weaving your way through an undulating geometric grid of
paddocks on narrow roads, nature reclaiming every unguarded corner and crevice.
More often than not, it is a landscape witnessed from the window of a car with
fences, livestock, pasture and plantation all whizzing semi-consciously by on your
way to somewhere else. But for Susan Simonini this is where she chooses to stop,
this is her somewhere.

Road to Somewhere is Susan’s witness statement to the place that she has come
to call home. Her deepening connection realised on canvas and in clay in a
refreshingly multi-layered body of work. The bold colour palette and deep shadow
of Susan’s abstract landscape paintings both contrast and are complimented by a
collection of monochromatic hand painted ceramic vessels and sculptural objects.
There is something rightly discordant in this collation that reflects the
unselfconscious nature of this environment. It is a place to be as you are, where
weeds grow, barns fall, machinery rusts and you can sell produce or manure at
your front gate. Each painting itself is a series of layered impressions that allows
for the aggregation of moments of light and shadow, perspective and time that all
combine to inform our experience of and connection to a place. Layers of paint are
built up from the ground with mark making providing a way into the landscape
from which pattern and form emerge and crystallise in the familiar forms of the
curving line of a road or the sharp-edged silhouette of a barn on a hill. This
process itself bears witness to the layering of personal, cultural and historic
contexts that continue to shift and shape the environments we inhabit and our
relationship to them. A dynamic that is reinforced in Susan’s colour palette
invoking the rhythm of the seasons; canola yellow of summer crops and dry grass,
the cherry blossom pinks of orchards in spring, the cool blues of winter and
darkness and verdant green that returns in Autumn.

Though a very personal portrait of a particular place there is also something
familiar, even archetypal about Road to Somewhere that acknowledges the
existence of the universal in the specific. It is there in the organic form of Susan’s
ceramic vessels that celebrate the language of hand painted road side signs, in the
sculptural objects inspired by the visual language of agricultural machinery and
industry and her iconic representations of shelter and passage within the field of
abstracted landscapes. The dynamic space that is created by this body of work
provide moments of intimate recognition as well as reminding us to explore and
celebrate the less curated corner in our lives.

Jessie Pangas
Artist and Cultural Producer
Curator - Wilderness Gallery, Cradle Mountain