Susan Groce

Since the late nineties I’ve been keeping little black travel journal notebooks—quick onsite diaries filled with meditations on place—actual and fabricated, both text and image. They are based mostly on travel in Canada, Australia, and Europe, often in austere and remote environments. These journals include personal impressions, lived experiences, remembered conversations, contextual information about places, environmental and climatic issues, mappings and references to cartography, off-the-wall cosmic questions about time and place, narrative fragments, incidents, and botanical oddities. They are also layered with streams of consciousness and spontaneous thoughts.

These notebooks have become source material for two ongoing series: first is an extensive series of small-scale (11 x 14 inches) travel journal drawings, created onsite and in the studio, which then, in turn, become source material for a second series of large-scale (4 x 7.5 feet) mixed media works.

In both series, for me, text is image—visually and conceptually—with almost imperceptible boundaries between the use of image and text. I think of it as aesthetic thinking. I integrate actual text (obscure and direct) into images as texture, value gradations, and pattern to form intuitive and unpredictable landscapes (land(e)scapes) of place, dream, imagination, thought, and discovery.

The large-scale works are layered “drawings”; the underneath base layer is acrylic color work on heavyweight Arches watercolor paper, while the top floating layer is graphite (largely text) on frosted mylar. These works are years in the making. The text is tiny: the viewer first sees text as purely visual elements—textures, patterns, and value gradations—but on close inspection the text becomes obvious, yet intentionally it is not easily read. There are no spaces between words or any punctuation. After deciphering a few lines the brain tires, you lose place, but you get the gist, phrase by phrase. For the determined, you can keep returning to these pieces to find out more. The text functions like a suggestion where intent is obscured, where bits are revealed over time. The text is meant to be a mystery, to contain hidden messages, and to invoke curiosity and speculation, and provoke discovery. The text also contains many sequenced repetitions, odd disjunctions and connections, and quite possibly a few spelling errors. While these works are rather esoteric, my hope is that the alchemy of text and image creates a mysterious and magical space, otherwise not in existence, a point of departure for the viewer to travel with their own thoughts and impressions to an immersive elsewhere.

A side note: The large-scale pieces are very delicate—light text floating on semi-transparent layers. They are almost impossible to photograph, so hopefully you can at least get a sense of how they might function in person.