SU ROGERS - ARTWORK SITE
Lunenburg, Nova Scotia Canada
Visual Artist - NSCAD Graduate
Su Rogers
Historia Atlantica Retrospective Exhibition
DesBrisay Museum
17th August 2024 -15th October 2024
PAINTINGS
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These expressive figurative works combine images and text to explore the often invisible work of Nova Scotia women in the fishery–both as fish packers and as fishers.
The paintings draw on many sources: religious iconography echoing the reliance on faith to sustain fishers and their families through storms and loss; classical symbolism relating to the age-old biblical work of fishing; and folk traditions and motifs which decorated and enriched domestic lives in the coastal communities.
Hopefully, I have succeeded in celebrating aspects of the seaward lives of the many women fish packers who work in small sheds along Nova Scotia’s South Shore and the fisher women who earn their living from the sea.
ASSEMBLAGES
I have been attracted to the material culture of the fishery since the shocking cod moratorium imposed in 1993.
Since that time, I have been working on various series of fishing-related paintings.
Partly for reference, I somewhat haphazardly accumulated a sizeable collection of vintage artifacts relating to the fishery. I drew inspiration from these objects, which offered a tangible connection with my own ancestors and the larger history of the South Shore fishing communities. However, as the collection grew, I began to realize that these objects offered an opportunity to explore a different kind of art-making.
Long fascinated by Medieval reliquaries, Victorian curio collections, the work of Joseph Cornell, and the idiosyncratic curatorship of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, I began to assemble the objects in combinations that were intended to transform their context, significance and impact–much the same way that found poetry can reshape a piece of prose so that it is experienced in a new, more evocative and powerful way.
Hopefully, the resulting assemblages will serve as modern reliquaries, evoking a way of life in all its complex and difficult glory.
BIOGRAPHY
Su Rogers, Lunenburg, NS
EDUCATION BFA, NSCAD University
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INFLUENCES
Folk Artists: Nova Scotia folk artists in general.
Marsden Hartley: one of the first American Abstract Modernist painters who explored folk-art expression during his summers at Eastern Points, Lunenburg Co., NS.
Alfred Wallis: acclaimed British naive artist who painted on available surfaces about hislife around the sea‒mostly sailing ships and landscapes.
Joseph Cornell: American pioneer of assemblage art.
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ACHIEVEMENTS
Su has exhibited her work for more than forty years in many different private and public galleries in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Ontario, and Quebec. Several of her painting sand assemblages are also found in the Nova Scotia Art Bank and numerous other corporate, private, university, and public collections.The regular recipient of grants from Canada Council, Ontario Council of the Arts,Regional Municipality of Ottawa Carleton, Su also won a major public-art commission todesign and produce ‘The Birdhouse Garden,’ a large, riverside garden with toweringfolk-art birdhouses at the Carleton Lodge, a seniors’ residence in Ottawa-Carleton.In addition, while living in Ottawa, Su served as the curator for an exhibition of paintingsby the celebrated First Nations artist Arthur Shilling.
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ARTISTIC BACKGROUND
Having always wanted to be an artist since early childhood, Su worked with tempera paints on large pieces of newsprint and sometimes on prepared canvas boards. As ayoung girl she spent hours reading comics about models (Katie Keene, Millie the Modeland others) and then would design huge wardrobes for them. She coloured the wardrobes with colour pencils to make them sing. Next, she cut them out the designs with tabs to attached them to the paper models which she cut out of the comics. Su took art in high school. She was a keen student of art and art history. She felt verylucky to have had a wonderful, encouraging art instructor.Eventually, Su was accepted into NSCAD, Halifax, NS. At the time, she was a young mother with two children attending art college, and she was prepared to do whatever was needed to complete her four-year degree, with the help of her husband and daycare. Her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree has been something she has always been very proud of. Her alumni ring says “no more boring art,” in Latin, on the inside of the ring,which reminds her every day to keep pushing her own boundaries.For the past forty years Su has been a practising studio artist. She has taken numerous workshops through Visual Arts NS and CARFAC (Canadian Artist Representation) to keep current with her art practice and studio work and to also feel a part of an art community.
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ARTISTIC FOCUS
This has changed over the years as one might. For the past twenty years Su has been focussing on the fishery, particularly women working in the fishery and artifacts from the fishery, in an effort to describe and evoke this life. More recently, she has produced two large triptychs depicting her complicated Nova Scotia ancestry, one triptych concernsher maternal line and the other her paternal ancestry. This was a huge projectsupported by Canada Council Research and Explore Grant.Her work resonates with people because it is based on the local fishery and historical references within her work. Paintings are worked with water-based oils. The three-dimensional assemblages are reworked vintage medicine cabinets filled with collectionsof handmade small tools used by fishermen in the past. She also uses text in her work to add another layer to the painted surface and to push the narrative along, hopefully providing another layer of engagement.
Further history and information:Su is an army brat. Born in Halifax, for much of her early life she moved from place to place every two years, including a two-year posting to Germany with her family. Shetravelled to many European countries and remembers everything‒even though she was 7 years old. Su settled in Old Town, Lunenburg in 2011. Her ancestral history goes backto the original Foreign Protestants, so she often feels that she is walking in their footsteps.
