Su Nelson
OBJECTIONABLES
T u e s d a y 2 4 S e p t e m b e r – S a t u r d a y 2 6 O c t o b e r, 2 0 2 4
Su is a Canadian-born multi-media visual artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her art practice explores the inter-worlds of materiality, psychology, and relational pluralities.
Passionate about championing an authentic creative process as a means of revealing the unconscious, she playfully manipulates a wide range of materials including bronze, wood, plasticine, hair, wax, clay, yarn, paper, and even hard candy – and likes to push things around between 3D and 2D realms. Exploring the micro/macro relationships to self/collective, conscious/unconscious, nature’s systems, and human history is in the background of everything she creates.
Her arts training includes early faux finishing studies at the Valerie Skemp Decorative Arts Studio (Canada), various extensive specialty fine arts workshops at The Vancouver Academy of Art, a Creative Studies Certificate from The Otago Polytechnic School of Art (Dunedin), a Masters in Arts Management (1st Class Hons) at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design (Auckland), and a Postgrad Diploma in Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland.
Since leaving uni I have been expanding on my knowledge of different materials and locating interesting pairings that seem to elevate each other energetically in the world of multi-media sculpture. This, combined with an art & ancestry pilgrimage around North America, Scandinavia, and Europe a couple of years ago, have led to a broader interest in the psychology of aesthetics and how this relates to individual vs. group identity, class and relationships, culture and ritual, and the quiet potential for symbolic violence in embedded ideologies. This is finding its way into my work through deeper and braver relationships to various media and methods, and an ongoing reframing (and unlearning) of old narratives.
The works in this exhibition are a kind of riff on these themes: a series of devil-may-care ‘objectionables’ sequestered in the corner like a bunch of complicated misfits ~ and owning it. They are authentically expressive, non-conformist, sometimes creaturely objects – unique in their own particular ratios of hardness, softness, silliness, and brokenness. They beg to differ, challenge our expectations, and eschew identity norms with their own brand of underbelly-chic acceptability ~ yet somehow they need each other in order to be themselves.
