susan flavell artwork

susan flavell

"My work deals mostly with animal and human forms, including the real, the hybrid, the fantastic, the monstrous and mythical.

A large area of my practice uses materials that have a limited lifespan, such as cardboard. The cardboard works are like large three-dimensional drawings, you can see the lines of their construction, including the “mistakes” and the rubbing outs. I also cast in various metals, a more permanent alchemical transformation of one material into another. Recently I have been experimenting with casting cardboard forms into bronze.

Developing the ‘presence’ of a work has always been important for me and is the reason that I focus on the 3D, as it occupies the same space as the viewer. I am interested in creating a sense of ‘agency’ or individual life for the object. Through the manipulation of the strips of cardboard and the adding of the realistic eyes, something changes that brings the materials alive, like Frankenstein’s monster. A combination of compressed energy, humour and sadness.

Identity is impossible to embody, and this impossibility results in an inevitable comedy; but though identity may seem to be a matter of perception and representation, and therefore illusory, it can also be experienced intensely."

Susan Flavell 2009

 

“Susan Flavell is best known for her sculptural work, especially with hybrid forms that mix the human and the animal. Such work can be read in relation to Deleuzian conceptions of identity – ‘becoming animal’. Theoretical accounts of this sort of identity often privilege a sort of ‘fullness’ or authenticity’, however what interests me about Flavell’s work is that her ‘creatures’ often carry with them an aura of sadness – they seem to me to be as much about failure of every identity to properly represent the subject."

Excerpt by Travis Blair Kelleher