​​​​​After gaining her Masters in Fine Art at Plymouth University in 2008, Susie David set up studio in the South Hams, Devon, UK - not far from the sea.
Her practice is informed by water and involves observation, contemplation and interaction with water and water's fluid teachings. David often goes down at dawn to swim - sunshine or snow - a fundamental part of her practice being a kind of elemental communion with water.
When warm enough, she might duck-dive beneath the waves with mask and snorkel to make underwater digital films. As well as filming, David employs a variety of processes on site and in the studio to explore water and as such, paintings, drawings, sculpture, performance, and poetry may arise.
She engages with water's fluid poetics, its wild philosophies, practices, and aesthetics - including, its indeterminate irreverent dynamics. Obviously, David is fascinated by and loves water and is aware that the cold water swimming has healed the debilitating migraines she used to have almost daily since childhood, and yet she holds respect for the wildness, the wilderness that is water, as both her work and herself have in the past been swept away by currents.
David sets out to learn from water and nurture a water mindset, and through her reading research she has found that Eastern philosophies and aesthetics often use water as metaphor, and as such resonate with and further guide her practice and her work.
In the studio she aims to allow her encounters with water to inform her as she paints, and to paint as if she herself were water, painting.
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?
Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu
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She entwines herself further within the work, by considering the painting surface - paper, canvas, or panel - to be analogous to skin. Where human skin and water's skin begin and end, it would be hard to tell. Boundaries and identities blur. Do we need to better honour our wild fluid oceanic natures? Has water quietly been teaching us how to be all along?
Books in the running brooks and sermons in streams...
As you Like it. William Shakespeare
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Her palette is muted, subtle and shadowy, of complex greys, falling light, flesh pinks and tans, of sun-bleached beached driftwood white, and burnt bone raven black and seaweed browns... Finger marks and any so-called 'imperfections' are left in as tell-tale evidence of her unashamed improvisatory physical process.
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She nurtures 'listening' or receptive qualities and methods, which she later conveys in her exhibitions encouraging a contemplative low light meditative space for the viewer. She has been known to say her work began as a "casual epiphany"...
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When drawing by a pond, way before her MA in the early 1990s, she suddenly realised she was not drawing an image of the pond, but something more. More than only: the sound; the warm damp spring day musky green twang scent; the languid rippled light reflecting; the light diving down murky; the reeds' dancing taffeta; the tiny wren voice bigger than it's body engraving into the air a cut glass song... She became aware that the elements swirling around her, included ...her. No longer separate, isolated, dry and defined entities - she found everything was intertwined. And just then, to her complete surprise - she dipped the drawing into the water. As if a kind of baptism or confirmation of interconnection. This altered everything, and her practice with water began. ​​
Susie David explores water in its many forms with an enthusiasm that is as infectious as the work is captivating. Her work draws creative energy through accepting and embracing tension and uncertainty and through surrender to processes beyond her control.
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In many ways David's work is a collaborative endeavour between herself and water, allowing the steam or the tides, falling rain or still waters to shape and respond to the ink she pours into it, the paper she leaves under it, the lens she points towards it. The work is as delightfully unrestrained by form as her subject matter is by use. Large-scale drawings made with seaweed in the midst of the encroaching tide are shown alongside various projections and film pieces. One such film shows white and black inks poured into still water. Filmed from underneath white ink becomes a dreamy mass of lazy tendrils, mesmerising as they stretch slowly downwards before the sudden injection of black ink swallows them up, jarring the viewer from a trance-like reverie with a realisation and reminder of darker and more disturbing possibilities.
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There is a continual sense that water, frequently domesticated and controlled, is - like life - ultimately unknowable and un-containable. A projection onto the floor in a corner of David's darkened space shows the edge of a broken wave lapping into the room as if spilling in from the other side of the wall before retreating and leaving the room empty, dry and, above all, safe.
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While delighting in and affirming life through interaction with water, its metaphors and its poetry, the threat of the unknown and that which can never be controlled is a constant presence in David's work – an intriguing and at times intimidating unknown just beneath the surface.
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Darren Harvey-Regan