Susan Norrie - Undertow



Tuesday 22 July to Sunday 12 October 2003

Undertow is simultaneously an overwhelming and deeply meditative video installation, one of the most ambitious that Susan Norrie has created, and the culmination of several years of experimentation and development in her art practice.

Undertow portrays the world in a state of both beauty and terror, shuddering with natural and unnatural events which verge on the catastrophic. The viewer is immersed in images of ominous tempests, delicate spring blossoms, bubbling mud pools, swirling clouds of dust, and scientific experiments which manifestly cannot make sense of these phenomena. The range and scale of images has a vertiginous and unsettling effect that pulls at the viewer's unconscious.

Undertow is the second Clayton Utz Contemporary Art Project at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and again their generous support allows the exhibition of an ambitious installation by a highly regarded contemporary artist. Undertow was commissioned by the Melbourne Festival for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2002.

Undertow is presented to coincide with the exhibition Susan Norrie: notes from underground, concurrently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art.