Susan Baird – Sense of Place

In Sense of Place, Susan Baird smothers otherwise serene landscapes in light. Baird works through a kind of collage, cutting together the sense of light at one moment (at say, dawn) with another (maybe as a storm rolls in) and another (maybe as a cloud rolls in front of the sun at noon).

Painting in open air, Baird works in and from multiple sessions. She describes her process as “distilling the landscape from its infinite possibilities”. Baird uses wide, quick brushstrokes that cut and crash against each other, and titles like Blush speak to the heavy, moted quality of light these cuts let through to spill over her relatively bare bases.

The way her paintings spill light, like a door ajar, gives the impression that Baird is a Dr. Frankenstein stitching together images of a landscape into a platonic ideal.

Despite these cuts, the stillness of Baird’s landscapes is almost eery. Light smothers Sense of Place’s two sites. Painted across two residencies in NSW and Tasmania, the precise way that light is spilling, or leaking, gives the impression that Baird is embalming (or eulogising) her scenes rather than revitalising them.

Yet at the same time, Baird’s method emphasises the diversity of the Australian landscape and the peculiarity of their quality of light, and she lays the eccentricities of Sense of Place’s two sites bare. (ZS)

Jul 21­–Aug 6. Arthouse Gallery, 66 McLachlan Avenue, Rushcutters Bay. Info: arthousegallery.com.au