My current body of work explores the unspoken and taboo topics connected to miscarriage, pregnancy and the transformative female form. By using traditional fiber techniques, stereotypically associated with women, I hope to create more consistent and honest conversations through approachable art.
Susan Merrick is a multi-disciplinary Artist. She is interested in conversations, language and communication, in questioning whose voices are heard, and in the access and spaces that can challenge or facilitate this.
With a background in BSL/English Interpreting and Sociology she makes work, projects and collaborations exploring these themes, utilising a context-based mix of social engagement, live art, public installations, film making, collections and documentation.
With relation to the maternal, she is researching through practice language and social support/attitudes and the power this has on maternal mental states, bodily autonomy and status.
Cried Milk (2018 - present)
Cried Milk uses data collected from a smartphone app to visualize what it looks like to exclusively breast pump for twelve months. Each visualization represents one month of data. The blue rings represent one hour, the change in value tracks the hours of sunlight and darkness, while the change in saturation indicates broad weather patterns (sunny versus cloudy). The straight lines each represent one day and the yellow circular bursts represent each 30-minute pumping session. The size of each circle correlates to the quantity of milk collected. This project connect to broader cultural conversations about motherhood. As infertility rates continue to skyrocket, many women experience motherhood through a similar, clinical lens. My hope is that this project gives voice to the millions of women who have struggled to become mothers and honor the under-valued labor of motherhood.
The Shape of Your Sounds (2017 - present)
Using audio surveillance technologies provided by a commercial baby monitor, I capture my baby’s cries and translate that data into visual shapes. The sound waves loop back on themselves in a 360-degree rotation. The result is vaguely reminiscent of the shape of a flower; each burst of sound looks like a petal. The initial purpose for this project was to try to find visual patterns that could be more easily interpreted. However, I quickly realized this was a fool’s game; the visual patterns are as indiscernible as his sounds. Therefore, what remains is a visual record of a moment in time; a beautiful reminder of those sleepless nights when the world was comprised of just my son and myself.
Sleep Regression (2016 – 2017)
“Sleep Regression” is a series of intimate works that were painted in the space of nap times and record the moments I watched my son while working in my home studio. The paintings’ small size and blue palette reproduce the video format and color, mimicking the tension between the close, private space of sleep and the distance created by the act of surveillance. The effects are eerie and disturbing images of rest. Lingering in the unconscious state of sleep the baby’s body looks lifeless. Are these representations of a sleeping child or a fetus? These works are thus unusual documents of baby’s first year of life–odd surrogates for the family photo album.
The gray-scale paintings, on the other hand, reinforce the reference to the sonogram, creating layers of distance. The painting series thus portrays an interesting paradox: the increasing stylistic abstraction chronicles my catharsis after years of fertility struggles as I move further away from my past sorrows, yet the works also reflect a turn inward and becomes more specific to my body (womb) and more private. The delineated forms in black, white, and grey look like the thermal imaging of a birth–drapery resembles the uterine wall, a dark ground morphs into a vaginal opening.
My work is engaged in discourses around feminism, labor and technological change. Embedded in the works are confluences of technique and meaning, craft and digital media, and everyday materials with fine art forms. The work is situated at the nexus of life and art, and walks a boundary between work and love. Labor and love act broadly as dual domains which sustain my interest in the ways a subject acts and is acted upon by intersecting social, economic, intimate, emotional and political forces. While some works describe the ways in which labor and love converge in personal and economic experience, others begin to search for meanings of love that may deviate from material, economic conditions to transform the terms of our intimate and collective relationships.