Artist Name: SUE
Artwork Title: IN THE LIGHT OF DAY
Medium: Oil, ink, cold wax on panel
Size: 61 x 61cm
About the Artist:
Sue Leeming is an Australian resident born in Taranaki, Aotearoa, New Zealand and is of New Zealand Maori (Te Atiawa, Ngamotu, Ngati Te Whiti), English and Scottish descent. She attended The University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine Art graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree and Post-Graduate Diploma in Fine Art in 1995. Sue immigrated to Perth, Western Australia in 1998 and is currently living and working from her home studio on Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar, Byford.
Her current practice is primarily based around painting and drawing mediums and extends ideas of abstraction, landscape, identity and spirituality. She experiments with the physicality of paint and process, allowing the imagery to spring from process. It’s in this place of painterly freedom that a unique space is created calling forth the subconscious world of the artist to connect with her external lived experience.
Underlying Sue Leeming’s work is an innately indigenous relationship to the land, waters and mountains of her homeland Aotearoa resulting in evocative responses to her experience as a visitor (manuhiri) living and working on the unceded lands of the Noongar people.
Living in the Peel region has had a significant effect on her sense of place and belonging, the displacement triggering a curiosity to understand how and why the local landscape influences her, particularly in her everyday, and how that resonates with the ‘places’ that inhabit in her mind.
Recent Exhibitions include: Summer Salon, Stala Contemporary Art Gallery, 2024, Thinking Hands, Stala Contemporary Art Gallery, 2023 HERENOW|2023: In-between-ness, Spectrum Gallery, ECU, 2023, Solo: Coalescence, Stala Contemporary Art Gallery, 2022, Asian Art Biennale, National Gallery Bangladesh, 2022, The Perth Royal Art Prize for Landscape Finalist, 2022, The Mandorla Art Awards 2022 Finalist. Sue is represented by Stala Contemporary Art Gallery
Artist Statement:
Memories coalesce to form meditative works expressive of Leeming’s intuitive approach to the language of paint and respond to the unseen, felt experience of belonging to the land. The paintings are like internal landscapes incorporating memories, connections to time and place and personal experiences.
There are the in between places, the ‘non spaces’, the gaps in my local landscape, I pass by these spaces as I go about my daily life. Sometimes I pause; my attention has been captured by a quiet presence. Something is familiar, the sun on the hilltops, mangroves that glisten with the promised rains, dead trees in the paddock, horses graze in the distance, winter clouds clothe the land, cars rush by.
I stand still and simply breathe as memories wash over me, quietness restores, and insignificant details become imbued with meaning and trigger memories of home.
As I reflect on where I have come from and where I am going, I am aware something has stirred those memories, something I can’t quite put my finger on. An invisible presence permeates the land. It feels like life and love and all who have stood here before me, all those who have passed through.