Susan Derges

About

Purdy Hicks Gallery is delighted to announce a major exhibition of new photographs by Susan Derges to be held at the gallery from 5 June to 4 July 2009. Susan Derges is one of the most critically acclaimed and respected artists working in photography today. She was one of the finalists for the prestigious Prix Pictet photography prize in 2008 and she is to be the subject of an international touring exhibition beginning at the Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne in 2010. The exhibition will have an accompanying monograph to be published by Steidl with an essay by Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Derges has exhibited widely throughout Europe, America and Japan and her work is held in many major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Much of Susan Derges's work revolves around the creation of visual metaphors. These explore the relationship between the observer and the observed; the self and nature or the imagined and the ‘real'. She endeavours to manifest or capture invisible scientific and natural processes — the physical appearance of sound vibration, the evolution of frogspawn or the cycles of the moon. Her works have taken many photographic forms but she is best known for her pioneering technique of capturing the continuous movement of water by immersing photographic paper directly into rivers or shorelines. She often creates her work at night, working with the light of the moon and a hand-held torch to expose images directly onto light sensitive paper. Her practice reflects the work of the earliest pioneers of photography but is also very contemporary in its awareness of environmental issues and the complexity of its conceptual meanings. For the past two years Susan Derges has been focused on the cycles of birth, growth, decay, death and renewal that occur throughout the year in a small field that lies close to her studio on Dartmoor, Devon. The land is enclosed by trees and water creating a sense of openness to the sky that echoes the Neolithic stone circles of Dartmoor, once used as observatories for the stars and planets in order to chart the changing seasons of the year. A new body of work will be presented at Purdy Hicks Gallery that centers around four large prints in which the sky is reflected in a pool of water in different ways according to the time of year in which the work was made. The prints are constructed and directly exposed using material from the field and communicate the changing state of a place that is both internal and external. Encircling this core group of images are prints that follow an imaginary journey that have been made on the streams and waterways that surround the site. Susan Derges's exhibition will be a major opportunity to explore the complexity of her artistic vision and her intimate exploration of a particular place.