Susan Adams Nickerson

Susan Adams Nickerson was born on Long Island, New York, in 1948. As a young girl she attended drawing classes at The Arts Students League in New York. She graduated from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, in Boston, Massachusetts and then came to Venice in 1972 to take a course in mosaics. Later she studied painting. She has shown her work in exhibitions in Italy and abroad. She works in various media: mosaics, cloth collage often using clothing labels, and paper collage with various “found” objects (candy wrappers, stamps, etc.) and drawing.

In her exhibit in Giudecca 795 art gallery (10 May to 1st June 2008), the artist plays on three themes interwoven by the media of found objects, mosaics, ink and mortar. Venice is evoked in the theme of relics and reliquaries: small precious objects caught in glass. Literature is evoked by words in mosaic form: letters as tesserae, words as painting, and painting as words. The rhythms of the spoken word are redefined: one listens to these mosaics, absorbing the artist’s conviction that writing is in itself art. Finally, the artist brings into play the nature of her own medium, the mosaic itself: an interplay of colour and texture, light and concealment, and softness and permanence.

The substance of Susan Adams Nickerson’s research is the seeking, finding, collecting, selecting and arranging of everyday objects to form a work of art. This artist’s intervention is via linguistic codes, which take on things of an arbitrary significance, and raise them to a logical, symbolic, conventional, rhetorical level. The process that produces this fascinating narrative weave, using mosaics as the technique, is the substance of this exhibition. One might say that the visual demands of all of Susan Adam Nickerson’s work are met in a single matrix, that of linguistics, of meta-languages. Susan’s artistic education was informed by the social and cultural factors that characterized the post-war America where she was born and grew up: a place of its own pulsing cultural ferment, which the young Susan interpreted through drawings and collages. Experiments in languages brought out in her, beyond creativity, a forceful character, tenacious and capable, with strong convictions in her choices and her modes of operation in life and in art. Coming to Venice and studying classical techniques there led her to discover the wonderful possibilities of collage in the art of mosaics. For Susan, experiments are illuminating while the methodology is practical. Above and beyond the seductions of the decorative, this permits her to conceive possible relationships between the objects she collects; it was for this reason she chose mosaics as the primary vehicle of her artistic narrative. But the essence of her art is her capacity to reinvent relationships and an interdependent nexus between the decorative malleability of coloured mortar, the transparency of the infinite tiny luminous drops of vitreous paste, and typographical characters, all applied to the symbolic meanings of elements of modernity that call on other linguistic codes for clarification and formalization. Her love of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, gives Susan the opportunity to inhabit the poetic text; while lingering among the textual ramifications she also gives recognition to rhythmic, sonorous and rhetorical devices, as a way of drawing on the emotions and imagination. As a producer of images, she acknowledges that ‘writing’ is also ‘design’. Susan recognizes the centre of gravity in the work of poetry, and draws attention to the physicality of the ink and the supporting paper that in this context assumes its own visual character and therefore aesthetic value. So the different iconic fragments undergo a physical shift and transference of meaning; the visual set-up is in a niche at right-angles to that aspect of mosaic art which connotes the sacred, accentuated by the luminous stitching of the mosaic tesserae which, in their undulations, transport us to the purely intellectual or spiritual dimension of ‘non-sense’. By the presence of actual words in her mosaics, the artist manifests an awareness that between the word and the image there are no borders; at the same time, a certainty that the conventional graphics of writing offer something worth looking at, something which actively participates in the dreamy climate that permeates and animates her creativity. In these pieces, one is reminded of the ‘words-in-freedom’ of the Futurists and the ‘object-poems’ of the Surrealists; references that reinforce her works, rendering them even more remarkable as works of art, original and at the same time engaging in semantic challenges. There’s an unexpected acceleration of cultural provocation in the adding of iconic elements foreign to this aesthetic sphere, such as birds’ feathers, the whiskers of Arturo (a beloved cat), clothing labels and old stamps. These last choices, validated by Dada-ist poetics and Arte Povera, open up new windows of dialogue between the aesthetics of found fragments and the actual meaning of the mechanics of making. With the work ‘Desiderata’ the starting point was a ‘mirror with a past’, an experienced mirror – a mirror that had lived through many trials, rescued from the ‘semantic garbage’ which, in an infinite game of mirrored cross-references and entropic abrasions, offered Susan a resonance, in her labyrinths of meaning, with the traditional Decalogue known as the ‘Desiderata’: ‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence ...’ In the work, the printed word is reconfigured in an unusual way, set into the back of the tesserae, a manifestation of the front/back duality embodied in mosaic technique. From the depth of the plaster, between thousands of facets and the numberless sparks of luminous commas, the narrative text is recomposed into a spatial perspective that allows the work in mosaic form to keep its pictorial-decorative character and yet preserve, in some way, the visual conventions of poetry. The ‘mosaic words’ have an extraordinary lightness. Their visual force comes upon us like a moving wave of lava; the eruption’s magma courses in snake-like motions, and echoes outside the frame, leaving the viewer with the work of concluding the composition. Susan’s mosaics succeed as multifaceted works, bringing together the natures, internal and external, of her narrative forest; canvases which, without resorting to the illusions of traditional figurative art, not only track down but also bring to light matters of deep origin sedimented in our consciousness.