Title
Fruitful corsage, bridal bouquet, lingering veils
1983
Artist
-
Details
- Date
- 1983
- Media category
- Painting
- Materials used
- triptych: oil on plywood
- Dimensions
-
186.2 x 376.0 x 5.3 cm frame overall
:
a - Fruitful corsage [left panel], 182 x 121 cm, each panel
a - Fruitful corsage [left panel], 186.2 x 125.2 x 5.3 cm, each frame
- Signature & date
Signed and dated l.r. corner [panel a], purple oil "S.Norrie '83".
- Credit
- Henry Salkauskas Art (Purchase) Award 1983
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 175.1983.a-c
- Copyright
- © Susan Norrie
- Artist information
-
Susan Norrie
Works in the collection
- Share
-
About
During the 1980s Susan Norrie rapidly became one of Australia’s most prominent painters. Her considerable technical ability was matched with an intellectual inquiry into the nature of painting after modernism. Along with many other postmodern painters, Norrie had an ambivalent relationship to painting: as was remarked upon at the time, her well-painted images, increasingly slick surfaces and elegant compositions deliberately set out to both seduce and repel.
Early works such as ‘Fruitful corsage, bridal bouquet, lingering veils’ 1983, exhibited in Australian Perspecta 1983, have a deliberately feminine sensibility and subject matter as they both draw on, and mark a departure from, the ‘central core’ imagery of 1970s feminist artists. In this work the thickly painted accoutrements of a dressing table are sexually charged. Resembling fetish objects and genitalia, they also seem to suggest a decaying moment in time, reminiscent of Miss Haversham’s wedding breakfast. By the later 1980s Norrie drew more directly on both historical paintings and on pop culture. ‘Fête’ 1986, which won Norrie the inaugural Moët & Chandon art award in 1987, has a surfeit of imagery but most prominent is the Mickey Mouse figure in a Pierrot’s costume, recalling Watteau’s famous ‘Pierrot’ of 1718/19. The commercialisation of culture, entertainment and leisure seemed the subject of this layered and ambiguous painting.
‘Untitled’ from the series ‘Peripherique’ came out of the Moët & Chandon residency Norrie undertook in France. The series title is the name of the ring road that encircles Paris, a confusing road marked by innumerable signs to potential destinations. In Norrie’s painting the word ‘debit’ is repeated again and again in differing scales, emerging from and submerging into the deeply varnished, darkly toned layers of paint. The elaborate copper-plate writing recalls the text of historic documents but is actually derived from Hallmark greeting cards. The word debit suggests loss, owing, debt; of paying your dues. It perhaps refers to the debt of artists to the past, but also of course to financial credit (another painting in this series had the word ‘credit’ repeated across it) and debt that structure contemporary living and have become even more pervasive since this painting was finished. Repeated with this much attention and scale, the word ‘debit’ seems to imply a central lack in this societal structure that is far greater than just economic.
A sense of the gothic and an affinity with death pervade many of Norrie’s paintings. In ‘Model seven’ from the series ‘Room for error’ Norrie has repeated a recipe for embalming fluid found in a house-hold book from 1926, ‘Henley’s formulas for home and workshop’. Each panel is coloured to refer to bodily fluids and the sticky surface (like ‘Untitled’ from the series ‘Peripherique’) implies decay and corruption. In the early 1990s Norrie broadened her conceptual enterprise to include sculpture, installation, moving images and sound. Her subsequent installations using both found film and original video are among her most impressive works to date.
© Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006
-
Exhibition history
Shown in 4 exhibitions
Australian Perspecta 1983, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 May 1983–26 Jun 1983
Acquisitions from the Komon, Salkauskas and Horton Funds, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 05 May 1987–31 May 1987
Review: works by women from the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 08 Mar 1995–04 Jun 1995
Up the Road, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, South Bank, 10 Jul 1998–23 Aug 1998
-
Bibliography
Referenced in 8 publications
-
Jenny Aland and Max Darby (Editors), Art Connections, 'Art media: materials, techniques, and tools or equipment', pg. 69-80, Port Melbourne, 1998, 78 (colour illus.).
-
Anthony Bond, Art Gallery of New South Wales handbook, 'Contemporary', pg. 94-108, Sydney, 1988, 106, 107 (illus.).
-
Deborah Edwards, Daphne Wallace, Margo Neale, Victoria Lynn and Sandra Byron, Review: works by women from the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, "Women Artists in the Contemporary Collection", Victoria Lynn, p13-15, Sydney, 1995, 13 (illus.), 14, 23.
-
Bernice Murphy, Australian Perspecta 1983, Sydney, 1983, 76 (illus.).
-
Ursula Prunster, Art and Australia, 'Project and Performance', pg. 96-102, Sydney, Spring 1984, 98.
-
Virginia Spate, Susan Norrie Peripherique, 'Peripherique', pg.7-21, Wollongong, 1989, 10, 11, 25 (illus.).
-
Wayne Tunnicliffe, Contemporary: Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection, 'Cultural memory, critical distance', pg.154-203, Sydney, 2006, 182.
-
Editor Unknown (Editor), Up the Road - Contemporary artist out of the Victorian College of the Arts, Victoria, Jul 1998, 45 (colour illus.).
-