Susan Morland

*Sue Hubbard

Out of my flesh that hungers
and my mouth that knows
comes the shape I am seeking
for reason.

Audre Lorde “One Night of the Full Moon”

Susan Morland trained as a classical musician not as a painter. It was in New York during the 1960s, that era when the young believed anything was possible, that she started to paint. Her lack of formal training has meant her work has been free of the shibboleths of much contemporary art: debates on formalism, abstraction and figuration. Her influences are closer to dreams. She has dug deep within herself to find her subject matter. Evacuation as a child to the Lake District, away from the bombings of Liverpool during the Second World War, gave her a sense of the world’s underlying instability. Nature, the woman’s movement, poetry, dance and psychoanalysis have all fed into her visceral work, which has formed a continuing personal journey, a visual narrative and spiritual quest with herself at the centre, not as an individual but as an archetypal ‘Everywoman’. She is not afraid of symbolism and, influenced by the reading of women poets, has woven metaphor, like a continuous thread, through her work. Her experience of motherhood, her friendships with other creative women and her pantheistic and pacifist beliefs, along with her desire to make art about injustice, have been the backbone of her practice, every bit as much as her love of other artists. Impressionism was her first artistic influence but then she discovered Soutine and Kokoschka who, along with El Greco and the emotional potency of Turner, lead her towards expressionism, which allowed her to explore the chthonic rhythms of nature and woman’s place within it. The female body has been the site of much of her investigation; her paintings are replete with figures giving birth or floating through dreamlike spaces. The self has been transmuted through a variety of forms, from trumpeting angel on a white steed, to an Indian goddess and headless jester. Palimpsests redolent with layers of meaning they have appropriated history and biology as well as the geography of her far flung travels to the Arab Emirates, Russia and India.

Such an engaged position is no longer fashionable in an age of irony, where passion has largely given way to a knowing insouciance. Yet Morland sits in a tradition of mystical artists. William Blake and Chagall, with his similarly floating figures, could be seen as precursors, as could the spiritual abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky, with its musical connections.

*Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, fiction writer and freelance art
critic writing for a variety of publications. Her new books include a suite
of 15 poems written on the west coast of Ireland, The Idea of Islands
(Occasional Press) with drawings by Donald Tesky and Adventures in Art: selected writings 1990-2010 (Other Criteria). www.suehubbard.com