sarah sutton paintings dispossession
The dispossession landscapes: Sarah Sutton’s paintings based on the life of her great great grandmother Catherine Flynn, who left Ireland after the famine in a coffin ship from Cobh harbour to a tenement in Harlem. C19th direct provision.
This series explores the whole question of dispossession & the power of the framing relationships that rationalize it. The trauma of dispossession, dislocation, trickling down the generations to find a home in present day lives.
The paintings are therefore conceptual in their way, and reference historical truths, but carry a visceral power for her too, with a present day resonance. Her aim in this series as in all of her painting practice is to find some way of resisting the polarity of then and now, conceptual and representational, the material and the immaterial. The search is for a kind of resolution, however provisional, that acknowledges and incorporates both.
The series arises out of a deep identification with the excluded, the outsider, the search for home – the unseen landscapes of her family history, denied and deleted from conscious narrative but carried all the same.