2022 Moveable Certainty

Susan Thomas has long worked with themes of human strengths and frailties.

These works works follow on from Memory and Other Frailties, a series related to unreliable narration and based partially on her mother’s deteriorating memory.

These paintings push into the area of connection and cannot fail to be linked to the Covid 19 pandemic.  Susan, living in Auckland, had, like everyone else, had connection to friends and family stripped back to non physical.  

Filtered connection via phone, computer and through masks …

Even during our normal, non pandemic, busy lives, people and friends move in and out of our sphere of reference --- “we’ll catch up soon” a common refrain.

If Covid has taught us anything it is that connection is possibly the most important thing in our lives.

We want to be with each other. We want to hug and laugh and cry and connect in the physical world.

In these paintings Susan is expressing all of this … the vagaries of memory, the coming and going of people in one’s life; connections made and broken and frayed and pieced back together.