Susan Collis's Any paradise can trudge here (2017), is a quintessential example of the artist's work. What at first appears to be an ordinary drop cloth covered with stains and drops of paint is, when examined closely, a textile with the reproduction of these random marks sewn in exquisite silk embroidery. Glenn Adamson, whose essay is included in the catalogue that accompanies Collis's exhibition at the Art Center writes: "This is the power of Collis's work: she connects the far extremes of experience, the most banal and the most wondrous, pulling them together into a tight knot." He goes on to state that the "little epiphanies" ofered by her work are "so immediate that even children can enjoy them (perhaps children above all). Such pleasures are tare in contemporary art." This is the first work by Collis to enter the collections.
Source: News Apr May Jun 2019
Images (1)
Audio (1)
Susan Collis (British, born 1956)
Any paradise can trudge here, 2017
Run Time: 2:28
Recorded by Susan Collis, artist / January 27, 2019
I’m Susan Collis and you’re looking at my artwork Any paradise can trudge here. So, what you’re looking at is a very, very standard drop cloth that just displayed pushed up again the wall of the gallery as if a technician has just been there with a ladder painting the wall above it and you can see lot and lots of drips and splashes on the drop cloth.
So this is in line with most of my other works where I just try and take something that is so ordinary that you would just walk past it without giving it a second glance and you have to then just really have a little bit of a closer look and hopefully something will just grab you and make you realize that it’s not quite what you think you’re looking at. So in the case of this drop cloth, all the marks on it, what look like dirty marks, paint splashes, and old stains have been made by a process of hand embroidery. So I use a variety of stitches and some of them are a classic satin stitch so that’s what I’ve used on all the drip marks and sometimes then I make up my own stitches, because I don’t really want to use stitches that announce themselves too much in a way. So all the kind of stained areas, the pink stained areas, it’s kind of where I’ve pushed the needle, the threaded needle up through the weft of the fabric. And I just see this very much as an observational drawing so I would take existing marks and splashes on a variety of drop cloths that I would borrow from people or borrow from galleries and then I’d set myself the task of recreating those all with stitch. And I guess I really like the idea that something that looks almost ugly has been crafted by using a very traditional and painstaking craft technique.
