A guest post from Susan Pearson, who is currently in her final year of the MA Contemporary Art and Archaeology at the UHI Archaeology Institute. Following her success at the Society of Scottish Artists’ exhibition in Edinburgh, Susan has written about the experience and her award.
I am a multidisciplinary artist, working from home, in Shetland, where I live with my husband and our four children. I am inspired by the entangled human and non-human narratives that emerge in my practice-led research, focusing on the transformative power of materials, (is)land, and the body.
My piece, Becoming Island, won the SSA prize in their 126th exhibition, and I was invited to create work for their 127th SSA exhibition.
I was inspired by the materiality of the mythology of the spinning fates. I re-imagined them as island deities, embodying dualities and blurring lines between mortality and immortality; domestic and wild; homely and eerie; rebirth and decay; inside and outside; and absence and presence.
I am inspired by Donna Haraway’s theory of entanglement and ‘becoming-with’ the interconnected multispecies world.
I used the Shetland dialect word Paes-Wisp – meaning a tangled or ravelled mass of lines or threads – to think through my work. I began with multispecies questions. Which human and non-human fates are spun together? Whose spinning yarns do we tell?
The Fates are three sister goddesses that allot the earthly destiny of mortals by spinning, measuring and cutting their threads of life. The three altered chairs represent the three fates, and the tangles of yarn represent the entwined destinies of the human and non-human. The “wall” and door are painted in wool and glue, gathered earth, dust, and second-hand paint, it is a landscape and an abandoned room.
The work has been created with found, foraged, second-hand, gifted and gathered materials – soil, yarn, thread, driftwood, parts of an old knitting machine and spinning wheel, chairs, a door, sheep’s wool sheared by my husband, hand-picked by me.
The process of thinking through and with the theories and materials I use is essential to my work. I use wrapping as a metaphor for protection. But wrapping can take many forms, we wrap a gift in paper, a child in a blanket, the dead in a shroud. Protected, concealed, contained, separated, hidden, and revealed. There is an intimacy between the action of wrapping and the object being wrapped.
I consider the time and care taken to wrap an object. (An interesting point is that I use materials that are natural and have a strong connection to myself and place. However, when I had to deliver my work from Shetland to the gallery in Edinburgh, I decided to wrap it in thick clinging black “pallet wrap” plastic to “protect” it during transit, this felt wrong to me; counterintuitive. It will not be wrapped in plastic for its return journey, and I will wrap any breakages in my sheep’s wool and yarn.)
Hybrid, homunculus figures, are wrapped and connected to the door and chairs and landscape and floor by yarn.
The figures are made from clay I gathered in Shetland; literally part of the islands where they were created. The gathering of the clay took time, grit and determination, digging and carrying buckets through the heathery hill at the side of a winding burn. It is shaped by me, yet, in the process, I am shaped by the material. My perception of the earth changes as I work with it. It is a “becoming-with” the land, the figures are of the earth, and like humans, they are made with the land.
