Susan Absolon

Amanda Thompson

Two contemporary painters with distinct approaches to place and painterly expression.

In Two Minds features the paintings of  two contemporary artists with distinct painterly approaches to picturing the places we inhabit; the changing landscapes of  the physical world and  the internalised landscapes of our thoughts.

For an artist, to be in  two minds can describe the elusive nature of the creative process, with its physical and cerebral dimensions, characterised by periods of intense engagement, retreat, blind faith and, often, self-doubt.

In two minds also alludes to the dynamic between the artist and the viewer as each looks to connect to the work through the lens of their personal experiences and individual ways of thinking.

Susan Absolon : “I work spontaneously responding to paint, to the way it’s held by a surface and to my inner monologue about the world. My paintings tend to have a sense of place about them, and sometimes a thematic interest in mortality, or conflict, or female experience. But my approach is intentionally loose and I like to follow ideas that come from the painting process itself. I often use textual rather than visual source material : poetry, the Thesaurus, urban slang, idiom, the language of bureaucracy, words with inherent ambiguity. I want a painting to show me something I haven’t seen before, both to define its own reality and to resonate with lived experience, and to feed the mind as well as the eye.”