Grief Work by Susan P. Gibson
As part of the Winnipeg Flash Photographic Festival, Susan P. Gibson’s work will be on display in the Atrium Gallery at Prairie Fusion Arts & Entertainment.
Bio: Born in Calgary Alberta raised in Portage la Prairie Manitoba visual was my first language. Recognized early for my drawing ability art has forever been both identity and survival; formal art education and practice enhanced my skills.
Throughout life invitations to celebrations and ceremonies from diverse friends informed my understanding of spirit and the inter connectedness of everything and everyone.
My interest is in the experience and value of those artists and audience who exist outside of the mainstream art lexicon. Lack of inclusiveness in ‘art world’ institutions leads to a loss for all. These Grief Work images honour the universality of grief and recognize the consistency of change.
In designing these images, I used a painterly approach, especially to composition colour and surface. Caught in changing natural light and over time, the images morphed to include inorganic and organic objects. This work reflects the influence of spiritual and artistic beliefs explored in Celtic and Indigenous art, which recognize that nothing living is still; everything is related and in an ever-changing reality. I strove to create photographs that would evoke puzzlement and wonder and make visual feelings that are universal and difficult.
Curatorial Statement: Diana Thornycroft
Susan P. Gibson and Grief Work
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” --- Susan Sontag
When a dear friend loses a loved one, we are often left feeling helpless, knowing that whatever we may be feeling, it doesn’t come close to the level of pain our friend is experiencing. We offer help, and as a custom practiced by many, we give food.
There are books and websites devoted to this practice, with titles such as Sympathy Meals, Grief and Groceries and Food Etiquette after a Death. Certain religions have specific rules; for example, in Judaism, during Shiva, the immediate relatives of the deceased must abstain from preparing food and cooking so they can focus on remembering and honouring their loved one; it becomes their community’s responsibility to provide meals for the grieving family. Giving food to those who are in mourning is an act that stems from obligation, generosity and love.
When Susan P. Gibson’s husband died, she was inundated with food. Some she consumed, some she froze, but in her exhausted and grieving state, the excess was simply left on her dining room table to wilt along with bouquets of flowers. After a while, in the summer heat, the casseroles and soups and breads and fruit began to shift colour, transform and spring new life. And magically, despite the emotional pain Susan was experiencing, despite the fact that she could barely breathe, she saw something remarkable taking place, and began documenting the decay that was happening in these gifts of nourishment.
Since July 2011, Gibson has continued to explore the subject of rotting food. Like any artist, the range of her subject matter has expanded as she has acquired knowledge about the materiality of the “products” she is working with. She has learned how to orchestrate decay at room temperature, which items take time and must remain in the fridge, what mixes with what to make what grow . . . Eventually she began adding contradictory elements to her still life subjects: pearls, marbles, glass and other found objects. Her repertoire continued to develop as she considered concepts such as the effect of time, process and environment on both unstable substances and items that will never rot.
Freud described the uncanny as the instance when something can be both familiar and alien at the same time. Because we understand the content of Gibson’s photographs, or at least, can imagine what it was before it started to “go bad”, her work embraces the very essence of the uncanny. Violent illness would follow the consumption of previously enticing, familiar things – like dainties and cake – which now, in their state of decay, have uncannily become threatening and dangerous. Although no one would deliberately eat any of this food, we cannot prevent our minds from contemplating that possibility. The visceral reaction to looking at objects that are fermented, moldy, curdled, rank and fouled is one thing, but to imagine swallowing sour smelling, toxic rot undoubtedly triggers feelings of revulsion. Compellingly, as the viewer spends more time with the work, a shift takes place. Within what we know to be rancid, we begin to perceive beauty, and eventually the experience of aesthetic pleasure takes over.
Writing about the uncanny in the 2012 Walker Art Center exhibition Lifelike, Niamh Coghlan, in her essay, Aesthetica stated, “There is a trauma of signification in many of these hyper-realist works, with the objects’ meaning being defined not by its true function but rather by its selection and isolation from reality.” She later goes on to say that many of the pieces in the show are “fixed on the Duchampian notion of taking an everyday object and placing it within a new context, or creating it in a new form, and thereby giving that object new meaning.”
Gibson’s photographs have done that very thing; in their new state of existence, edible items no longer look nor function as they should. Some of the images, like Humid Melancholy, and Transforming Energy have more in common with a colour field painting than the documentation of rotting food. The way she has framed and isolated these still life objects before her, by effectively removing all cues that would identify their original “thingness”, has kept them preciously non-representational. Through her lens, flat areas of colour and texture dominate the composition, and it appears we are looking at unrecognizable textures in a compressed space; where form, background and ground are one, and our eyes are drawn beyond the edges of the photograph. In other images, like Identity, with the employment of a shallow depth of field, the space opens up like an extraordinary landscape. Some of the photographs, with their harmonious colour palette and elegant forms are simply stunning; Black Iris, Transparent Life and Seafoam Shard are three such images.
Ultimately though, despite what we see and know about the photographs on the wall, it is their raison d’etre, the state of grief from which they were born, that provides the deepest impact and emotional response from the viewer. Grief takes centre stage. Without love, grief would not exist. Without grief, this extraordinary body of work would not exist. Without Grief Work, I believe Susan would not exist. The life-altering impact of losing one’s partner in life shunts you into a space that is at times dark, unfathomably anguished and often precarious. It is very likely her creativity and curiosity that was able, like a life line, to pull her through and help her to regain a vision of the beauty and truth that can be found within nature and slowly slowly within life.
As the curator of this show, I want to thank the artist for her unique vision and for the pleasure of reviewing and selecting the work in the exhibition. As her friend, I want to acknowledge the strength and courage it took to pick up that camera after her world had fallen apart. On behalf of everyone who has seen Grief Work, I want to express our collective gratitude to Susan P. Gibson for giving us insight into a world full of awe, wonder and play, and to congratulate her on her truly remarkable accomplishment.
Diana Thorneycroft
Curator