golzar
Susan White's complex installation draws on images and symbols of plant forms created by master craftsmen, many from the Middle Ages in Europe and the East. It is inspired by the idea of a meditative garden, like the walled and colonnaded gardens of the Alhambra in Granada, only this is a garden of imagery and symbolism, of cultural connectedness, rich with allusion and memory. It is an elegant visual feast in the form of a welcoming arch and a rectangle or billet laid out on the floor, constructed from finely worked metal plates, approximately six hundred 6" x 4" XPII tinted photographs, and direct inkjet scans of plants. The photographs show plants from the artist's mother's garden, stylised plant forms from Medieval, Islamic and other sources, and metallography and electron microscope images. Leaves, petals and fronds unfurl in echoing arabesques. Their formal congruence is a revelation - forms echo through the centuries from culture to culture, and are seen recurring in nature in White's photos of her mother's lovingly created garden. It is a painterly use of photography with subtle blending and gradations of tones, reminiscent of the pattern-making on the tiled floors and walls of mosques. There is light and shade, texture, the restless variations of organic form, all underlying the geometric structures of the metal plates in a complex tapestry. The sixty-five metal plates evoke Medieval heraldic shields, or board games from ancient cultures.
This work encourages us to walk around it and see it from all angles. White has placed high-key coloured fresco panels here and there to enhance the shimmering watery illusions created by the metal. Furthermore there are multiple reflections in the metal surfaces, and