Susan Walsh Art Consultancy

The consistent theme of my work has been marking time through observable changes in natural phenomena. I explore the cultural conventions of time juxtaposed with ephemeral elemental events. This exploration began in my studio when the western winter sun struck a piece of thread on white paper and created a drawing with its shadow. I am inspired by artists who think about control and chaos/entropy as artistic practice and meditation about time.

Since that first experiment, I have created drawings with sunlight, waves, wind, and rain. I have engaged in explorations with wind, using the dispersal of charcoal on Arches paper to indicate the wind’s speed and direction. I have also marked time with rain: I coat impermeable Yupo paper with gouache and expose it to the rain; when the rain evaporates, the gouache reveals traces of its impact. The work is complete when the viewer experiences the absence of the material that makes it.

The series Time Story refers to the scientific and imagined stories of deep time and stone; the stories of manufactured wood and human production time with birch plywood; and the immediate, momentary story of seeing the sun, wind, rain, frost, etc, mark time on the sculpture. As has been my practice, there are two parts to this work. A sculpture that is sometimes a lyrical sundial and a photograph which marks a moment in time. The photograph bridges the space between photography and drawing with it’s tromp l’oeil visual effect of a drawing.

I am also exploring the element of fire with my Carbon Portrait series. Pieces of Carbon ash and nails are photographed, printed, and then reactivated with charcoal powder and air.

Past work included wood panels, nails, and graphite, or graphite and thread become lyrical sundials to record sun and shadow. To record the temporal nature of sea waves, I marked paper with blue gouache and let a wave crash over it, then indicated the time of the wave. As I mapped my experience of the force of the water on multiple beaches, each wave commemorates its particular existence, while the series as a whole conveys the eternal breath of the tide.