Susan Montgomery

Susan Montgomery and Yvonne Woods, The Joinery 2011

Works by Susan Montgomery and Yvonne Woods are influenced by the prose of Canadian Writer Anne Michaels. Their inspiration is drawn directly from Michaels 1996 novel, Fugative Pieces, a profound meditation on loss and love, the dead and the living and the indestructibility of the human spirit.

Taking Michaels themes of archeology, memory and the body as central concerns, the artists articulate these ideas through their individual work processes.

“The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place…like love that closes its mouth before calling a name.”

Montgomery is interested in the manipulation of found paper and film, layers of histories and biographies arranged by chance and viewed in various manners. Montgomery uses a View Master which she has taken apart and reshaped in order to view manipulated snapshots of given scenes. 

Woods has used silver gelatin glass place prints on handmade fibre based photosensitive paper. Using an outmoded printing technique and one hundred year old photographic plates taken by a friends uncle ‘Leo Hayes’, Yvonne visits an unknown past, expressing a loss of history through deterioration of object and memory.

Yvonne and Susan are Irish artists based in Dublin and West Cork respectively. They come from backgrounds of print and painting and are graduates of NCAD and DLIAT respectively. Their work is held in both public and private collections including The Office of Public Works, Trinity College and the Ice Hotel, Balina.