Susanne was artist-in-residence at the Cooroora Institute in October 2008. This is a review by Tamsin Kerr of an earlier exhibition.

Subversive art, subaltern landscapes: the surfacing of Susanne McLean

There is a brand of postcolonial theory that emphasises the hidden, unconscious influences in our lives, and challenges dominant assumptions. While commonly applied to the unacknowledged influence of colonised indigenous cultures, subaltern theory might analogously be applied to the influence of the land. Perhaps our cultural intelligence actively emerges from a regional immersion in the landscape, an embeddedness in place. The land might play a role in evolving a community’s intelligence. Certainly, the land is used to sustain both humans and their stories. Might it be more than a passive resource; even be recognised as an active influence? How might we express its generally unacknowledged influence? Perhaps we might hear the active voice of the land though the creative arts of its inexpert inhabitants, rather than through external and rational expertise.

When unwanted development threatens communities, their embedded response is often to protest on behalf of the land. The proposed mega dam on the Mary River in Southeast Queensland has been met with community voicings of its animal inhabitants – the endangered cod, turtle, and lung fish, as well as the cows and horses who can’t swim. Corrugated signs on roads, letters to papers and parliaments, express the Mary River community’s emotional connectedness to their particularities of place more often than their farms’ economic roles as both home and workplace. While the wider community debates the general value of mega dams and ways to use water more wisely, the affected Cooloola community pleads the beauty of the valley as both spiritual and economic sustenance. Perhaps the voice of its landscape begins to emerge.

The Gympie regional gallery’s show of Susanne McLean’s works, Emergent Landscapes, expresses both subaltern influence and the voice of the land through such art. McLean’s especial connection to and long term love of the Mary River is clearly (and serendipitously) relevant to her Cooloola audience, but her work transcends the local in its subtle expertise and innovative techniques, as well as its sheer aesthetic. McLean’s ability to capture the voice of the land as well as our emotive and intricate dependency is breath-taking. But she also subverts the role of the gallery and of its audiences. The viewer dissolves into co-artistic creator, by being asked to imagine and draw their own emergent landscapes. Rather than imposing a traditional landscape painting upon the viewer, McLean uses techniques that overtly ask the viewer to impose themselves and their preconceptions upon the work.

The most sophisticated of her works lies in the textured browns and rusted creams of Leonardo’s Bedroom Walls. These two abstract paintings show McLean’s urbane technical skill, reminiscent of Anselm Kiefer’s work. They invite the audience to sit and imagine another place, in the same manner as DaVinci. The landscapes and creatures that might emerge from the works are only constructed by the viewer. McLean deliberately keeps the colours calm and negative with no sense of structure, so as not to influence perceptions; the outcome is as much an exercise of the viewer’s mind as it is of the artist’s hand. Its multiple layers suggest both the exhibition’s title and the sense of timelessness that is required to imagine shapes in clouds.

A roll of butcher’s paper stretches across one wall: a participation piece that invites thoughts about the Mary River and the visitor’s own emerging landscapes. (A week later, the paper is full, not surprisingly of comments and pictures about the looming dam, and an accompanying plinth includes a home bottling of Mary River samples brought in by its riparian residents.) More subversively - given the usual ‘Don’t touch’ attitude of galleries, another apparently finished canvas of multiple surface techniques and painted colours hangs with pencils attached. Its title, Underpainting for a Landscape, and its non-threatening prettiness, invites audience contribution. Over the time of the exhibition, the river’s brown umbilical cord is slowly surrounded by a new layering of pencilled emergent landscapes.

The portraits of the Mary reflect McLean’s seventeen years living by the river’s gifts. In the Birth of Mary (an allusion to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus), the multiple tiny brown tributaries of her headwaters also suggest the river’s saline mudflats, perhaps reflecting upon the spiral nature of life and death. The colourful Portrait of Mary records the river’s journey from the mountains to the sea as the tree of life. Similarly in Dam Dams, the coloured capillaries of Mary’s fingers reach into the earth itself, the repeated words ‘Dam Dams’ form a line at the base, weeping tears of green. Dam Dams - a statement about the vivacity of life and the antithesis of a protest poster - is unusually cut and hung into a corner of the room, another challenge to country gallery conventions.

McLean’s techniques are often self-developed, such as the unique potassium staining process of In the Beginning, or her commonly used evaporation process that parallels topographic land formation. Emergent Land’s red primary colour tells us this is a luminous unknown place, but the evaporative technique creates the familiar patterns of aerial photography. McLean emulates the techniques of the earth in forming her paintings. She scrubs and rubs with stone, salt, and sand to simulate erosion; leaves the canvasses to develop in a large outdoor sandpit using elevation and compression amidst flood and evaporation; and gives final coherence to their emergent messages through brushes and sponges (often balancing on ladders in the process). McLean borrows from land evolution techniques, playing and working with the intelligence that emerges.

The painting that most strongly suggests such terra forming is Idea of a new possibility. Its blues and browns are streaked with surprising glimpses of bright oranges and pinks. On the left is an orange dot; the brown islands submerge or surface amidst blue sky/sea, developing in complexity across the vast, wall sized, canvass to an earth-like bubble. This is a abstract spirit of creation that emulates the roof of the Sistine Chapel in vibrancy and form. Its hopeful subaltern re-reading of the evolution of the world is presided over by a vaguely discernable mythological creature. Its submerged landscape is also the emergent space for a rereading of our nature/ human evolution. Idea of a new possibility speaks a contemporary landscape, ever emerging.

What comes across most clearly in my interview with Susanne McLean is her absolute driven fervour for painting. She thinks about painting all the time; she says her passion for painting cannot be taught, but comes from the soul and the sheer joy of creation. Instead of a sit down interview, Susanne takes me on a detailed enthusiastic journey of each of the exhibition’s works. When I ask her about her past, she describes earlier paintings instead of her life. Her art is her life; she has always painted. Few biographical details slip into the conversation: some of her children’s adult interest in the environment; her ever-supportive husband Ron; her time as wife and mother in Malaysia; her experiment with Canberra School of Art’s sculpture course; and nursing her mother through Alzheimer’s in Wagga. Through it all, she painted. But this early work was too painfully personal, so she burnt it in the mid 1980s. It was not until moving to Maryborough that she began to come to terms with her passion. She reinvented her shattered self with a knowledge that she ‘had to do this now’. She found her lifeblood and her subject matter in the Mary River that flowed through her property. McLean feels she has finally matured creatively: her sense of calm and acceptance juxtaposes the ultimate joy of production.

McLean’s works are vast in scale and conception. She says ‘to sustain a vision you’re never seen before is a hard hard thing to do’; her paintings have a depth and meaning that reflects this focused passion. She has sold little of her work (a regretted three), so the canvasses are un-stretched so as to be easily transported and stored. This is her next challenge – to be able to let go of her emotive and cherished environmental responses as well as her paintings. McLean has recently moved from Maryborough to Brisbane; her solo exhibitions tracking her southward journey from Bundaberg through Hervey Bay and Gympie to a residency at Brisbane’s Powerhouse. Her paintings at least deserve the next move to the more southern capitals of Australia’s art world. Emergent Landscapes shows her debutantes to be the most beautiful of the country ball, ripe for wider Australian picking.

In both content and context, much of Susanne McLean’s work is simultaneously beautiful and threatening; it reflects that which we both flee and seek - the wild in our minds and in our environments. McLean’s is sophisticated and original work that shows the crucial value of the view from the edge. The edge is a place of greatest diversity, from the banal to the sublime; in this case, it is a place from which the deepest critiques and most innovative work emerges. Emergent Landscapes is rife with complex ideas and original techniques that allow the viewer to read their own yarns from its subversively simple cloth. McLean handles the complex subject matter with an effective communicative talent. Her art shows how important our perceptions are in reading the landscape and how critically the landscape itself shapes our souls.