• Painting

Pushed, bewitched, or just had enough.....

Suzanne Carroll

Following many useful years, my stack of carefully curated earthenware bowls toppled from the edge of their shelf. They ricocheted off unforgiving flagstones and shattered. I knelt with regret on the cold floor as I gathered their exposed earthy innards.
In the light of the late afternoon I clinically laid them out on a sheet of white paper. I photographed their curved bellies starkly juxtaposed against jagged edges. Photographs from an inconclusive autopsy revealed fantastical landscapes and puzzling still lives.
I journeyed back and forth between the increasing evidence: drawings, photographs, mono-prints and case notes, all of which spoke of the remains. Preliminary works on paper seemed to shift somewhere between abstract and representational. Finally, without any prompt or ceremony, I dressed each one in a fitting acrylic palette and laid them to rest one by one on a carefully prepared canvas.