Susan Norrie has consistently explored states of mind through her use of materials and space. In her first critically acknowledged paintings in the late 1970's she developed her earlier collaged abstrations into deep relief compositions based on paraphernalia from a womans dressing table.
These images were intensely claustrophobic, the familiar forms of powder puff or pearls slipping all too easily into a queasy semblance of flesh. In subsequent paintings the material excesses of these compositions gave way to a facination with memory, which became the repressed presence in fantastic and often grotesque images. These forms served as metaphors for psychic states in which consciousness begins to slide ut of control, dissolving the corporeal boundary between a claustrophobic interior and a monstroous exterior landscape.
More recently, Norrie has used installations to stimulate responses and associations in the viewer. Her objects animate their environments like furnishings in a domestic environment, yet defy the logic of such functional objects. Black, shiny surfaces and frames, or cabinets that can have no access, transform these locations into blank, mnemonic sites waiting to be filled in with unacknowledged memories. Norrie has recently been working with films taht are edited and slowed down to intensify the visual and atmospheric effects.
The rooms in which the films are shown function as installations. The claustrophobic presense of the image is an effect of its relative scale, while the furnishings of the space further enhance this impression. A powerful theme linking all of these works is the generation of profoundly disturbing psychic experiences. Norrie often explores states such as epilepsy and trance, triggering our own latent terror at any slippages between consciousness and the unconscious.
In Liverpool she is presenting a new film installation in which their are two images. One is projected and is large enough to allow the viewer to experience a bodily sense of compression in the space. The other is shown on a smaller screen set into the wall. The room is painted gloosy brown, again producing a sense of claustrophobia while emphasising the uniformity of the space. The images - which combine archival footage with fictional material - deal with human tragedy and personal trauma.
The wall projection includes footage taken from film and documentaries dealing with Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters. The small monitor set into the wall shows a slowed down sequence from the scene in Woody Allen's Interiors where the mother is taping gaps around the windows before attempting suicide. She is both sealing herself into her tomb and desperately trying to keep out whatever constitutes her greatest fear. When the film is slowed down, the sound of ripping tape becomes ugly and threatening. As symmetrical images of entrapment, both films link life and death to the obsessive preservation and rupturing of spatial boundaries.
[LESS]Susan Norrie has consistently explored states of mind through her use of materials and space. In her first critically acknowledged paintings in the late 1970's she developed her earlier collaged abstrations into deep relief compositions based on paraphernalia from a womans dressing table.
These images were intensely claustrophobic, the familiar forms of powder puff or pearls slipping all too easily into a queasy semblance of flesh. In subsequent paintings the material excesses of these compositions gave way to a facination with memory, which became the repressed presence in fantastic and often grotesque images. These forms served as metaphors for psychic states in which consciousness begins to slide ut of control, dissolving the corporeal boundary between a claustrophobic interior and a monstroous exterior landscape.
More recently, Norrie has used installations to stimulate responses and associations in the viewer. Her objects animate their environments like furnishings in a domestic environment, yet defy the logic of such functional objects. Black, shiny surfaces and frames, or cabinets that can have no access, transform these locations into blank, mnemonic sites waiting to be filled in with unacknowledged memories. Norrie has recently been working with films taht are edited and slowed down to intensify the visual and atmospheric effects.
The rooms in which the films are shown function as installations. The claustrophobic presense of the image is an effect of its relative scale, while the furnishings of the space further enhance this impression. A powerful theme linking all of these works is the generation of profoundly disturbing psychic experiences. Norrie often explores states such as epilepsy and trance, triggering our own latent terror at any slippages between consciousness and the unconscious.
In Liverpool she is presenting a new film installation in which their are two images. One is projected and is large enough to allow the viewer to experience a bodily sense of compression in the space. The other is shown on a smaller screen set into the wall. The room is painted gloosy brown, again producing a sense of claustrophobia while emphasising the uniformity of the space. The images - which combine archival footage with fictional material - deal with human tragedy and personal trauma.
The wall projection includes footage taken from film and documentaries dealing with Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters. The small monitor set into the wall shows a slowed down sequence from the scene in Woody Allen's Interiors where the mother is taping gaps around the windows before attempting suicide. She is both sealing herself into her tomb and desperately trying to keep out whatever constitutes her greatest fear. When the film is slowed down, the sound of ripping tape becomes ugly and threatening. As symmetrical images of entrapment, both films link life and death to the obsessive preservation and rupturing of spatial boundaries.
