CV/Bio
Biography PDF
Significant Other: Invisible People - Hidden Skills is an attempt to give recognition to the varied histories and skills of the many homeless people who find themselves continually sleeping rough and to acknowledge them as the multi faceted and knowledgeable people they are.
Work in progress - SHELTA: In Transit
Explores decisions about the most important and /or necessary objects to carry/store when continually in transit.
Offers an archive for depositing experiences/information/images on the realities of issues affecting people without the security of permanent
shelter.
Develops a creative participation through the making of model structures/works on paper/ moving image/photography and texts.
Recent work includes:
Rub a Tub Senior - Invisible Wash Project Space Leeds
Susan Walsh and Lubaina Himid are both concerned with the power of everyday objects and the making visible of lost lives. We make work about the invisible and the unrecorded.
Rub a Tub Senior - Invisible Wash is our most recent collaboration. Susan thinks about people with transient lives, the objects they rescue, carry with them and treasure in a new place. Lubaina overpaints old objects with patterns, portraits and texts to make new readings of established histories. We have worked together making films about artists lives, old houses and museum collections. Between us we have explored behind the ‘scenes’ at the V&A Museum, The Bowes Museum, The Hatton, The Geffrye Museum, The Tate, Stoke Museum and Platt Hall.
To Scatter - A memorial to Irish Migrants, was shown in St Wilfrids Church in Preston as part of ‘In Certain Places’ curated by Lubaina Himid as part of an annual on-going programme which commissions natiional, regional and international artists to create art in public places for Preston.
Delete-Space-Shift-Return, is a project in which, using film and photography, Susan Walsh documents the lengthy deconstruction and eventual reconstruction of the old Tyson Smith Sculpture Studio at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. This along with her video Displaced Space documenting the Barbara Hepworth workshop at St Ives forms part of a larger investigation into creative spaces as containers of memory.
In her film tones after sunset furniture is used as a medium for exploring what it might have felt like to be Gwen John, inhabiting through the exploration of the interior spaces of the cabinet, fragmented moments of a possible history based on both fact and fiction.
Distance No Object An installation of 83 drawers and five photo collages, activating readings around museum collections/buildings as containers of memory was central to the group exhibition at Bowes Museum 2004/5.
Cupboard Love at Castlefield Gallery Manchester 2003 was an exhibition of six hybrid furniture constructions and fifty small paintings on paper which deal with working class enforced nomadism.
Domestic Tableau the exhibition she curated in 1999 of six women artists using domestic objects in their work, was an early step in exploring the existence of a symbolic creative language and included Shani Rhys James, Mary Fedden, Julie Fu, Lubaina Himid and Jill Morgan.
Re/Call
Her residency at the Geffrye Museum in London in 2001 allowed her access to the museum displays as well as stores holding furniture and objects from 1600 to the present day. She was also able to film the stores, the furniture both inside and out and look at museum records, all of which fuelled her enthusiasm for discovering hidden signs of use and past experience/memories within the fabric and interior spaces of the objects.
Her project culminated in the publication of the limited edition artist book Re/Call
Moving image Collaborations
Susan Walsh and Lubaina Himid worked with ideas around women’s creativity and the madness which can develop from ‘seeing too much’. Their film Earth Life Seen From The Moon previewed as part of Prestival 2007 and then shown at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery - juxtaposes museum and domestic interiors connected to their lives as women, as artists, and as constantly interested observers.
Collaboration projects with Lubaina Himid also include Open Sesame in 2005 and The Point of Collection 2007 as part of a Tate/Uclan collaborative project : Making Histories Visible. Open Sesame - DVD + Booklet Publication was the first in a series of publication research resource documents in which Tate and Uclan in collaboration have sought to develop their work around the impact of past, current and possible future exhibitions, displays, competitions and collecting strategies initiated by Tate in relation to artists of African, Asian and Caribbean descent.
For further information visit www.susanwalsh.org
www.makinghistoriesvisible.com
