A conversation with artist Sue Nelson
A conversation with Sue Nelson (She/Her) Artist, Arts Manager, Mum to 3 kids and overall cool human!
If you could live in the world depicted in one movie or novel, or if you could travel back to a different era, which would you choose?
I would say 1920’s Paris or Spain - just hanging out in the cafés with the art crowd… ah and the whole night scene and no bras!
I wouldn’t want to stay for what came after…
I saw that you come from Vancouver, Canada, what do you miss the most about Vancouver?
Forests and my people - it's a really special land, especially western Canada, it's like nature on steroids. There's a real spirit to the land – the First Nations spirit, similar to New Zealand having a Māori spirit, that you feel privileged to be a part of.
You’ve discussed ideas of culture and identity in your artwork, would you like to elaborate on this?
Yeah I had a series called Pink Ravens which was all about that.
It was after living in New Zealand for 5 years before I’d gone back. When you go back to a place that's so utterly familiar and lives in your cells but you’ve been gone for so long that your eyes see it from a whole new perspective, you just notice every little thing that you used to completely take for granted.
It just really got me thinking about being this hybrid of a person, and how many people are displaced - whether by choice or sometimes not by choice, which is a difficult thing to think about. There is this visceral longing for your homeland, but it's almost romantic and more exciting to be away from home and long for it, rather than necessarily living there my whole life.
Burned (2018) Sue Nelson
Your art show Burned (2018) pays homage to women who didn’t make his-story books. Do you feel we are progressing in terms of equality and women's rights?
Overall, yes I think progress is being made and yes we are standing on the shoulders of our predecessors and we should carry that on however we can. But I think what’s written down and what’s still embedded in people's psyches is still really, really lacking.
On an individual level it takes real effort to dig, find and proactively seek out female artists from history - there are so many - that's what makes me so mad, discovering all this amazing artwork and artists, or even scientists and other female innovators, way too late in my life. Like why didn’t I get to know about them earlier?!
Female artists should really have the recognition they deserve. Louise Nevelson, for example, should be as famous as Picasso in my opinion. She was so prolific and lived through that same era, slogging her way to recognition with no support and very dismissive (male) media reviews. She wasn’t married to a famous male artist like Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe who helped them in that regard - even though their work stands on their own. Louise Nevelson did the traditional thing a woman was supposed to do – got married and had a son – but then chose to follow her creative libido and passion in life, divorced and worked independently, and was condemned for this in a lot of ways. When I think of all those male artists who had their careers catered to, it really pisses me off.
The Burned piece was a surprisingly angry work, and that was a part of the process. I took an axe to this painting, a big plywood piece I’d been working on but wasn’t going anywhere, axed it up which felt so good, and hacked it into beautifully splintered pieces. Then I literally sat over the brazier on my deck and burnt each piece lovingly. It was kind of this weird act of watching the fire do its thing and then blowing it out.
I definitely agree, I feel like as women we have to go above and beyond to even get a snippet of recognition compared to a man. To this day, I question how much we have really progressed…
Yeah, I think it’s a lot to do with habits of mind. I’m guilty, I think we're all guilty because it's just whatever is sitting there unconsciously in your mind, or something you don’t know that you have to actively seek out.
It's the same with the George Floyd Black Lives Matter protest, it snapped a fair few people out of our white comas, like oh we can't just sit here and say we're not racist, we have to actively be reading African American authors, and talking about artists and other important work and take a proactive stance.
What is one of your favourite mediums to work with?
Plasticine is one of my new favourites, I had a lot of fun with it last year. But it’s hard work - it's really tough stuff, literally you start working up a sweat, and your hands get sore trying to move it around. Right now I’m working with relationships between plasticine and clay, I love that you can make plasticine the exact same colour as the clay and sort of have them be these two mediums with different properties but they really speak to each other and have a relationship and it's awesome, so I’m just having fun with that.
Who are your creative inspirations?
I love reading non-fiction, things to do with the psyche, nature, how the universe functions. Science is fascinating - I think science and art have way more of a relationship than people realise. Chaos theory and things about complex dynamical systems. I love reading about stuff like that because you read it and you have these impressions or visions of materials and properties - it gets juicy!
During lockdown last year, I started to knit a lot. I made a coded stitch alphabet and knitted poems and things. It looked like a bad knitting job, but there were beautiful and profound things being said by them - and they sort of related to complex dynamical systems too.
What else are you working on at the moment?
There’s a project that I want to bring to life to help make classrooms and workplaces less restricted by entrenched systems and more geared towards creativity and wellness.
I would love to be a facilitator where I’m connecting people from all different sorts of wellness industries, arts and creative industries, people with real practice and expertise who can just come in and do random disruptive things in workplaces or classrooms, but with a greater purpose.
So within your workweek you have the opportunity to learn about your own psyche and connect with yourself, other people and with nature. Maybe we walk down the street for a bit of tree bathing, as a meditative morning tea, or have drawing lessons and things like that, that teach us the biases of our own brains. It's sort of a self-awareness thing where we get a little bit more balance in our everyday grind and inject some fun at the same time.
There needs to be way more creative lesson design and delivery in high schools. I just watched my kids go through high school and I’m still shocked at how archaic we’re still doing things. It could be so much more stimulating and less siloed like cool field trips, community involvement, and work experience, even just more fun. Especially the more senior levels, they’re just told it’s business time, no more fun, head down… past papers, past papers, past papers – so boring! My kids were totally burnt out and bummed by the end of it all, it's no way to graduate and enter adulthood.
We’re not getting sparked. There could be so many opportunities for young people to get sparked by something real that they tried in school - where they made connections because they were a part of a class and when they graduate they can approach that company and be like ‘I was here for a thing once and I really loved it and would you have me on?’. The community engagement I think goes both ways and could really benefit companies.
What do you see for the future of the art world?
For it to be way more integrated with the other worlds! If this project I’m working on pans out, it really would mean way more integration and value being placed on the relationship between the corporate environment and the creative and wellness industries - because at the end of the day it's all just human beings operating all of it.
And we are becoming quite unhealthy - collectively, so the whole concept is that if we nurture the individual, we nurture the collective, and vice versa like a yin yang thing. We can't have one without the other. As soon as it tips one way or the other it's out of whack.
I think the arts shouldn’t be such a struggle. I would love to see a living wage introduced because, we’re missing out on a lot of good stuff like innovation and good ideas - because people are too tired, or overstretched or too poor to sit down and do their craft and think up really cool things.