sarah sutton paintings the states in which we find ourselves

landscapes of the interior - sarah sutton dark horizon, 2017

sarah sutton
dark horizon
2017
light through oil & grief on canvas

Sarah Sutton’s paintings explore the states in which we find ourselves, looking for a relation between a sense of place and what it evokes. In her psychoanalytic training and doctoral research into the neuroscience of how minds are wired, she found an astonishing everyday truth: neurons that fire together wire together. Our minds are wired by and through experience.

where history and memory dance

The great neuroscientist Ramachandran has said in talking about perception, what we notice about the world, that it’s as if each of us is essentially hallucinating all the time. What we call perception chooses the one hallucination from the vast warehouse where history and memory dance that best matches what we notice. We don’t see what’s in front of us, we see what’s already inside us.

This truth sheds a very clear light on the idea of the internal landscape. We speak and act as if people and the landscapes we occupy are outside us. It is as if their images fall on the back of our eyes as representations of reality, inside our inner space. In fact, states of mind internalized through experience wander like ghosts, like migrants (unaccompanied minors perhaps), through our inner landscapes, looking for a home in what we encounter.

the states in which we find ourselves

The states in which we find ourselves are multiple, and arise like songs through call and response. This is a development from Mark Rothko’s idea of the complex inner self, somehow beyond, even severed from external reality.

The thinking of Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin and the neuroscientist Allan Schore illuminates from a range of perspectives the individual as profoundly involved in their historical relational context.

This context is formatively expressed in – and neurologically wired in by – the qualities of relating the intergenerational history entails. Rothko seems to have seen exploration of the interior self as a search for freedom from the grip of family history, indeed of history itself.

Meyer Shapiro writes  that “the abstract painter of the early twentieth century assumes that the mind is most completely itself when it is independent of external objects. If he (sic), nevertheless, values certain works of older naturalistic art, he sees in them only independent formal constructions; he overlooks the imaginative aspect of the devices for transposing the space of experience on to the space of the canvas, and the immense, historically developed, capacity to hold the world in mind. He abstracts the artistic qualities from the represented objects and their meanings, and looks on these as unavoidable impurities, imposed historical elements with which the artist was burdened and in spite of which he finally achieved his underlying, personal abstract expression”.

history is personal

This pursuit of an unencumbered truth turns out to be illusory. The personal has proved to be historical, and vice versa. We cannot help but carry our histories, our emotional landscapes, with us, within us. Exploring the inner landscape involves finding a relation to parts of self experience, internalized from experience of the (m)other’s state of mind, the qualities of her gaze, as the work of Marcus Rothkowitz attests.

The move to abstraction of the new york school focuses on the painter’s emotional experience of being, and paradoxically transcends the limits of a particular life through the expression of this experience.

bordering states (of mind)

In Sarah Sutton’s paintings, the mind contains the experience of the landscape. We are witnessing interior landscapes in a state of flux. There is a search for (provisional) resolution between bordering states (of mind). In each painting, there’s a struggle between polarities of verticality & horizontality, chaos & order, serenity & degrees of disturbance.

There is a layering of emotional geography, a palimpsest of representations of experience.

im/material

The work seeks to express the relation between the material & immaterial, in search of a closer approximation to the truth of human feeling. Not the polarity our C21st minds reach for under assault, to be regulated and soothed, but each profoundly involved in and expressed through the other. Our immaterial experience of the material world is expressed in our inner landscapes, our inner landscapes expressed in our perception of the material world.