My work is the result of my chasing visions that I can almost see. I want to make a visual expression of feelings and thoughts I have experienced in the past and in imagination and dreams. On a conscious level I put a construction on the images that I make so that they make formal visual sense to the viewer. I want to find and to make visible the thing I am looking for, and I want to show it in a form that will communicate it.  I want the viewer to feel that he is seeing something that is from his own life.

I have a fund of ideas, a vocabulary which comes from early memories of colour and space. Some of these images are views of remembered spaces. Some of these imagined images are an attempt to make a feeling into the visual, by constructing spaces which would  make me feel like that, or by making a figure whose attitude shows how it feels to be in that space.

I start with a space or a figure expressing a feeling from this fund of ideas. Once I have something to look at two things start to happen. The picture evolves as I add on ideas as a response to what I see, with a logic the viewer can read and engage with.  Also, I respond to what's on the canvas formally, within the structure I have created I can work with ideas I have about language, which may or may not consciously interest the onlooker, but which are the core of the development of the work.*

Sue Vesely, MArca  May2009

*See  July 2008 Statement (below)

My work is about the body being seen as an expression of the mind.
        I use the figure from every angle, to me the surface of the body is an expressive landscape.
The pose the figure takes is a mechanical structure, which is a three dimensional description of the emotional life within the mind of that figure. The limitations of the body are a common language. We all know how it feels to be in the pose when we see splayed fingers or an arched back.
We are connected below the surface by a common language that is wordless.
Our minds also work with colour and imagery.
To use this connection, I show the figure in a narrative situation and the composition is often constructed to give the viewer a role to play in the picture:
                                   I intend that at a subconscious level, my naturalistic representation of a familiar world, will give the viewer a sense that the picture is about him, as he recognises that he has seen this reality before.
A narrative usually forms in the mind of the viewer without any comment from me, except for the title.
       

Susan Vesely MArca   March 2006

I have an idea that it is a natural fit to the mind that a single work should contain more than one language.

We can think of a new name for a colour but not a new colour for an invented word.

There is a difference between a thing that exists exclusively in the vision and a thing that has a named identity in the mind. Things exist in the vision that can only be “named” by a description of the events that cause them.

Such nominal descriptions can only express the  general idea….. “Sunlight falling through leaves and the shadows hitting the wall…”, whereas the visual representations of them are specific and unique, whether they are naturalistic equivalents or abstractions derived from visual phenomena. 

These visual events are familiar without verbal description.  In my work the appearance of light on incidental objects is an imagined and sometimes observed naturalism.

Representations of the body are read differently to representations of other visual phenomena  because they represent what we consciously think of as the self, and not an external event. Images of the body may be of all kinds,  naturalistic, symbolic, or stylised, any logical representation of the body, whilst they will still be read differently to the other events because they represent us. The figure can be represented generically or  specifically, can be anonymous and androgynous, and still command in the viewer recognition of human identity. In my work the figure is stylised and distorted to express the mind within.

Some things exist on the canvas as of themselves, and purely visually .They exist on the canvas only as expressions of artistic values, without reference to phenomena in the visual world off the canvas. They are a third language in the work, things that can be seen only on the canvas. They  occupy a space created by the logic of the narrative structure, but they are other than narrative.     ....An illogical, independent colour in an otherwise naturalistically derived structure, filling the area that would be occupied logically by another object, will in terms of the narrative reading of the picture, play the role of that object. For instance, where there are slabs of flat blue in the spaces where some kind of modulated representation of a shadow would be expected to continue the narrative which is set up in the rest of the image, the shape of the shadow remains, but to look into it is to experience an abstract colour, existing outside the structure of real visual experience.  In this way the canvas can be read as narrative or fragmented into various visual experiences.. 

So it becomes possible in one work to create an interface between languages where each is seen more clearly. The juxtaposition reveals the nature of each. A picture executed only in one language, requires the viewer to enter into the system of that language. The contrasts between elements reveal to the viewer the truth about each language and do not require the suspension of all other forms of perception, for the image to be read.

The narrative may be read as whole or fragmented and the mind of the viewer is the operative factor.  This is a confluence of languages expressing or pointing out the nature of the interface between eye and mind.

Sue Vesely, July 2008.