susie david

Though curiosity and work takes me world-wide, after my Masters in Fine Art at Plymouth Uni, I established the studio-base I still have in South Devon, UK. However, I consider my primary studio to be outside - usually by some sort of water, such as: sea, river, rain...

 

A crucial part of my practice is to make time to be with water - to calm the body and mind in order to tune-in and observe closely. It's a kind of elemental communion. 

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Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

– Lao Tzu

 

Research often involves getting under the skin of water in varying ways.​ I swim year-round, and snorkel when the sea temperature allows, to make underwater films. I also make 'sketches' while being in the water, using life-friendly materials, in collaboration with water itself. These sketches may involve ink, wax, ash, pencil or pigment, digital pixel - both film and stills, the gathering of sound, words, and other wrack... 

 

I explore water's fluid poetics, the wild elemental philosophies, the indeterminate dynamics of water in its myriad forms. I study water in order to learn from its ways of being and to develop a water mindset, and as such my work is grounded in water's philosophies, practices, and aesthetics. These factors happen to resonate with those of Eastern philosophies, which, maybe not coincidentally, often use water as a metaphor.

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Back in the inside studio, I reflect on these encounters - and attempt to make work - as if I myself were water. 

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It all began when drawing by a pond in the 1990s, I realised I was not drawing an image of the pond, but rather an inner visceral sense - the feeling, the sound, the scent, the wind playing in the rushes, and the light - some light reflecting off it's wind-ripplings, and some light diving down into it, and over it all, a tiny wren singing a vast crystal clear liquid song there at its edge...

 

I became aware that these elements were not isolated, not separate entities, but a dancing interconnection of dynamic play in the same one moment - myself included. And in that moment, as if to celebrate my merging with this alchemical water, I spontaneously - and to my surprise - I dipped the drawing into it! It was as if the paper was me and I was in the dance. This altered everything, and my communion with water began and with it my art practice. 

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