SUSAN ROBERTSON-BARANICK

ARTIST BIO

Susan Robertson-Baranick (BSc, MD, FRCP) is a retired Pathologist with a subsequent BA in Art History and Psychology and is a recent BFA graduate. Although majoring in painting she has a love of nature especially in the places she visits every day. Developing a special interest in environmental art as well as communication she won the Persephone Prize in her graduating year. These interests have led to a change in her chosen medium to include photography and photogram production using sustainable printing (cyanotype and solar fast) and botanical dyes.

Like the British Land Artists, exploration and walking are an important part of the process. Although the concept “take nothing but pictures (and memories) leave nothing but footsteps” is deeply ingrained this is combined with environmentally friendly foraging of native and invasive botanical species in order to bring nature into her work.


ARTIST STATEMENT

While my photography practice is tied to community education, my Photogram based practice is abstract. Nature inspires me with the joy and the memories formed in places I have hiked for many years. Using plants, light sensitive dyes, and botanical pigments to communicate the essence, emotional impact, and seasonal changes of specific landscapes that touch me as observer, hiker and forager, I create alternative “portraits” of these places that combine present and past experience floating through time and season.

These pieces become abstract but are clearly organic in nature. Lacking ties to a “specific” place, communication of common human experiences is facilitated. These pieces are meant to evoke memories of places, colours, seasons, and stories in the observer. These memories of places of joy or excitement, recent or remote, may sometimes be modified by the same touch of melancholy I feel linked to human induced accelerated changes in nature.