Susan MaCarrell
“Make sure it all relates”
“Make sure it all relates,” says Susan McCarrell. These are words of advice she remembers her father giving her before going on job interviews. I enjoy how the words hang in the air without any explanation, but I have always believed random statements blurted out near the beginning of a conversation are signals of important themes about to unfold.
McCarrell’s work speaks to a tactile curiosity, one she developed as a child growing up in Winnipeg, a hub for garment manufacturing in Canada. She loved the long aisles stacked with bolts of fabrics and fancy threads, and was proud to wear her homemade swimsuit and formal dress to graduation. Today she calls herself a process driven multi-disciplinary artist, decades later her work reflects a process similar her childhood. To encourage creativity, McCarrell joyfully loses herself in an exploration of materials. She shows me an example of a panel of paper coated with so many layers it has curled and taken on the texture of leather. Next, she unrolls a long narrow strip of canvas used to test different wetting agents and how they react to various mediums. Pigments bleed on the canvas to achieve a watercolor effect but with a much tougher texture.
After leaving Winnipeg in her teens, and spending several years in Vancouver, McCarrell is now a full-time artist living in the interior of British Columbia where a diverse climate and topography give way to skiing, boating, wine touring and the high vibrations of the desert. While curiosity and creativity move her in numerous divergent directions, she still manages to follow her father’s advice and create a body of work that “relates”. Her aesthetic is distinctly muted, as if stained or discolored by time, while form and composition are caught in a constant state of emerging. Her approach, mainly based in abstraction and materiality, builds a world that appears ruled by the subconscious. She speaks of her art practice as a meditation, as if her pieces originate in the quiet mind and are then worked into existence.
In spite of the ethereal textures of her work, she also ventures into a bold depiction of faces. Strong, well-defined markings still manage to achieve a muted effect, as if these faces are appearing like a photo images developed in the dark room, on the verge of coming into full focus. I love her faces and I am surprised to hear they are a more recent addition to her exploration, and that she is somewhat diffident to them.
This particular conversation reminds me how important it is for an artist to have an audience from time to time. It turns out McCarrell loves social media and has no shortage of conversation regarding her work. While tinkering with setting up an online store, she has found people simply direct message her. “I treat my Instagram following like a community and I end up having the best conversations,” she says. As a result, she has shipped her art all over the world.
As we come to the end of our conversation, she shows me a raw canvas scattered with materials relating to a trip to Italy. Sheer ribbons pass over textured paper, she loves the veiling effect but is not sure how she is going to make it work. Shavings of clay are among her materials which she plans to reconstitute as a form of paint, and thermal paper activated by different sized irons await transformation by the artist’s hand.
My thoughts digress and I think of numerous times I’ve scooped up shiny wet rocks on the beach and been captivated by their beauty. Unfortunately, when I have tried taking them home, they tend to dry off, become dull and not that interesting. It turns out there is more going on in these moments than just wet rocks. The elements need to relate; the glistening sun, the ocean breeze, the salty smell, while not part of the picture, they bring the moment to life. “Yes, that is how I feel about this piece, I am not sure how the pieces will get moved around or if they will ever come together as more than what they are right now,” says McCarrell. I feel privileged that she shares with me the excitement of an artist approaching a new work. Nearing the end of our conversation, the sparse guidance of McCarrell’s father has taken on much depth and dimension. It is a pleasure to enjoy McCarrell’s work from this angle, where time and personal connectivity is mixed up with the tactile creativity of a curious girl mixing media, painting, sculpting and collaging until she finds that moment when it all relates.