Emu Ridge Artwork
Artist: Sue Callanan
Title: Letters Home (2023)
Medium: Ply, pine, paper, card
Box Frame
Size: 305 x 228 x 40 mm
$250
Above: Close-up detail Front Side
Artist Bio:
Sue Callanan is a visual artist whose practice spans 4 decades. She creates sculptural installations and objects which are responsive to their site-
the architecture and its surrounds, including the social function or historical context of the space.
She has exhibited widely in galleries and in public space both in Sydney where she resides, and internationally (UK, USA, Finland, South Korea and Brasil).
She co-founded Articulate project space, an artist run initiative, in Leichhardt, Sydney, which has been operating since 2010.
Artist Statement
There are two works in the exhibition: Letters Home, and MOMENTS in time.
Works are site specific, often using minimal interventions to highlight the architecture it occupies, or its function. In this instance the artwork, Letters Home, becomes a parcel, or package, signalling the function of the post office where it is exhibited, and from where it will travel to its next destination.
Letters Home responds to the theme of the exhibition, Foreigner Everywhere. Kangaroo Island, was listed in 2023 by Lonely Planet as No. 2 world tourist destination. With the seasonal influx of tourists arriving from across the seas, I am interested in the letter or parcel, that for centuries has been a means of communicating one’s encounter with a faraway land whose sights, sounds or customs are somehow different from one’s own; where one brushes up against characters who, by their very existence challenge the notion of who ‘we’ think ‘we’ are.
A companion piece, an artist’s book, titled, MOMENTS (in Time), 2023, can exist either together or independently of Letters Home.
The concertina book on one side reads ‘MOMENTS’ (one letter per page). On the other side there is a line of text on each page. It holds the essence of a travel diary, but one that is never intended to be filled in. The lines of text are an evocation for recall and imagining- a call to give attention the place where one is, its sights, sounds and one’s encounter with oneself on moving into different territories. As much as it might reference a book, it is intended to be perceived as a sculptural form of moving parts- a form that can expand and variably contract. The use of ply veneer is devised to enhance its reading as a built form.
The text is written using poker work (pyrography).
Under the title for the show, Foreigner Everywhere, I‘ve opted to think of the ‘foreigner’ as someone from somewhere else- a visitor or traveller rather than ‘ the other’ (which implies someone too different to be trusted). It is someone visiting a place unfamiliar, who then has the capacity to communicate their experiences to others.