Suzanne Bellamy lives in southern rural New South Wales on land near the tiny village of Mongarlowe. She directs Mongarlowe Studio Workshops, a print, sculpture and ceramic studio, fires gas kilns, and prints on a Charles Brand Etching Press. All etchings and embossing were produced on this press, on acid free Fabriano cotton paper. When in the United States she produces work at the Graphic Design Studio of State University of New York–Oswego, under the direction of Professor Cynthia Clabough.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The many forms that fuse in my life as an artist have not always come together so confidently as they do now. I became an academic historian for some years while still developing an art practice in the spaces between a university teaching/research career. Along the way I accumulated experience and training as a thinker and researcher, a printmaker and sculptor, a potter, a Virginia Woolf scholar, an activist and feminist, a writer and a traveler.
In the 1980’s deeper energies surfaced and I shed one life, living since then as a fulltime artist and writer. My home base is in Australia where I live in a solar rural studio south of Sydney. With platypus in the creek and echidnas nearby, surrounded by a lovely eucalyptus forest, it is possible to live out some of the passions of my work, involving magical space, ecology and land care, layered cultures and political change, water, village life, and who we are in the universe. I developed a creative visioning practice in my twenties and use meditation as a tool in my work and creative life.

For over a decade I have visited the USA annually, exhibiting, traveling, and working with other artists on many diverse projects. These include the Michigan Women’s Music Festival Graphics Crew (five years), Virginia Woolf conferences, music festivals and arts workshops. Like Gertrude Stein, I embrace the New World while exploring my links with the old. I love the place of the Outsider. Living in postcolonial Australia, a new culture and a deeply ancient one, is a complex and conflicted fusion.

Language fascinates me, from hieroglyphics to color form, from speech to musical abstraction, archaeology to architecture, based in a close and often comic reading of signs in the earth, and a memory bank of geomancy and creative multiplicity. The idea behind the most recent show ‘Trading Places–Fusion and the Commerce of Form’ is the ecology of forms. My six year painting and print project on Virginia Woolf originated in reading her work as intentionally visual in its core structure, painting with words, the visual essay. It was a great place for me to further explore the fusion of forms in ideas and the visual, and the passionate pursuit of the structure that could evolve in some future world where the brain released us from current divisions of meaning. Both Woolf and Stein, as rule breakers in all ways, are abiding influences.

As art practice literally lives in the body, I find my approach to materials also blends techniques. Printing and embossing draw on methods found also in carving porcelain or approaching canvas as a living fabric, using sponges and tools more than brushes. Techniques feed off each other and all ask, “where do ideas come from?” where is the great egg where art begins? Deep continuities in my work are expressed in the pots, there from the beginning and there always, too big to travel, made from the earth and the fire, holding an old energy.

VISUAL ESSAY PROJECT

The visual essay project on Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein has included three series of monoprints ( The Room Within - 20, Conversations with Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein - 12, Virginia Woolf and the Creative Process -12) and three paintings/installations ( Lily Briscoe's triptych of the novel To The Lighthouse, the novel The Waves, and Woolfworld, an eight panel room installation with miniatures. ) The Project is being prepared for publication with an equal component of text essay to accompany the images.

GRAPHIC SCORES

The Print Series called Graphic Scores explores the relationship of light and visual forms to sound and music. They could each theoretically be played. They are informed by ideas from Graphic New Music and atonalism, post-war avant-garde new music theorists, and Gertrude Stein’s exercises in Serialism and the Continuous Present. Underlying this process is a creative visualization exercise involving a journey to “A Place Where Art Comes From,” a spinning egg formation composed of sound and light vibrations only. Materials used in the embossing process signify musical notation, where metal plumbing washers stand as notes. In homage to Stein, I also use common household objects and dried foods, such as lentils, rice and couscous.

CANVASES AND BANNERS

Following the theme of cross-border work practices,
I approach the canvas as a living fabric, drawing on techniques from fabric painting. I use salt, hoses and a very forceful application of color, and expose the surface to carving methods and multiple layering.

PERFORMANCE

In 1996 I first created and performed the comic archaeological/fantasist art project called 'The Lost Culture of Women's Liberation, the Pre-Dynastic Phase 1969-74'. Performed many times in several countries, using slides of created artifacts and models, it combines women's history, and a futurist trope of digging up a fossilized ritual site, while paralleling the 1904 explosion of cubism as a moment of cultural shift.

As co-founder of the University of Mongarlowe in 2000, ('no fees, no faculty, no degrees') I have written and performed in outdoor pageants in Australia, developing the character of Chaucer and medieval mystery forms as a trope to explore post-colonialism.

Statements about Suzanne Bellamy’s artwork by other writers:

“Suzanne Bellamy’s visual essays on Virginia Woolf are stimulated by an intimate, collaborative engagement with Woolf’s writing. Academically trained, Bellamy also thoughtfully reads the relevant feminist and lesbian criticism on Woolf, other women writers, and the visual arts of modernism and Bloomsbury. Then, in her unique and revisionary way, she offers her visual essays as both scholarship and art, speaking and exhibiting at academic conferences as often as in art galleries. With infectious enthusiasm, she bridges the gap between scholarship and the visual arts by suggesting their mutual influence and shared creativity.
Suzanne has been a galvanizing presence at annual Woolf conferences since 1997. Her dialogues with artist Isota Tucker Epes about their visual responses to To The Lighthouse and The Waves have fascinated many of us interested in the differing perspectives and multiple points of view associated with modernism. Suzanne’s willingness and ability to articulate the creative process engendering her various Woolf-related series have resulted in candid, amusing and moving sessions.”
Diane Filby Gillespie, WSU, author of The Sisters’ Arts, The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf.

“Suzanne Bellamy’s artistic visionary journeys guide us through non-linear times and spaces to intensely passionate encounters with our feminist literary foremothers, among them Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. Notwithstanding their spiritual lives on multiple planes and dimensions, their cosmic conversations are conveyed to us with reverence, magic and humor. Bellamy’s ceramic groupings such as those in her installation The Lost Culture of Women’s Liberation, the Pre-Dynastic Phase, reveal our former revolutionary selves to our future extra-planetary incarnations, creating a bridge of solidarity that spans the centuries and cements our clairvoyant, comic creative connections.

Hatched from illuminated World Eggs of outer and inner space, her women figures and forms are singing and dancing in the round, cavorting and jubilating in celebration of the sacred cycles. Ancient, newly-born and re-born to ecstatic identities, Bellamy’s creators, performers, artists and ritualists seem to express a yearning for the recovery of an Ur-community and for the invisible geographies of a Great Mother.”
Gloria Feman Orenstein, USC, author of The Women of Surrealism, Women’s Literary Salons, 1975-1985, The Theater of the Marvelous, The Reflowering of the Goddess, and Leonora Carrington.