Sue Rogers
Artists Statement
‘The tedium, pain and repetition inherent to woodcutting, reflects the tedium, pain and repetition of isolation. With each push of the blade, each repeated mark, the artist is digging into the human condition. She is excavating an essence.’
Sue Rogers’ preoccupation with the figure comes from a position of empathy. The artist’s background in counselling, SEN work, and assisting the homeless has cultivated extreme levels of compassion, along with a curiosity to get beneath people’s exterior fronts to the essence of personhood that lies within.
In a perverse way, the Covid-19 pandemic has afforded Rogers with a streamlined artistic focus. Not only has it presented her with the time and space to interrogate her practice, but it has also generated her subject matter. Themes of isolation, empathy, identity, and mortality have become a collective preoccupation. Rogers has managed to exteriorise this inner turmoil in a profound and compassionate manner with her woodcuts, portraits, and miniatures.
Each element of her practice effects and progresses the next. She will begin her woodcuts by drawing from photographs. Rogers has participated in weekly life drawing for twelve years, seeing it as ‘practising her scales,’ in preparation for the full performance. The tedium, pain and repetition inherent to woodcutting, reflects the tedium, pain and repetition of isolation. With each push of the blade, each repeated mark, the artist is digging into the human condition. She is excavating an essence.
The woodcuts, for Rogers, are an extension of her drawing practice. Yet because of the graphic nature of the medium, it has helped her paintings become looser and more abstracted. Equally, the chance and drama of a print’s outcome has increased the artist’s rigorousness, challenging her to continue to push and change her painted portraits.
Rogers has discovered different techniques for handling paint, using both clean, detailed brushstrokes and, alternatively, rags to generate swathes of energetic mark-making. These heads share the repetitiveness of the woodcuts. They have been afforded the same dimensions, all of them 10 x 10 inches, displayed side by side on two wooden shelves. Yet, as each face is expertly individual, these portraits are as different as they are similar. They present the viewer with both a collective humanity, a shared trauma, as well as separate and singular isolations, representative of how the pandemic has both divided and united us under a blanket of fear and compassion for strangers.
For more information: https://www.suerogers.co.uk