THE FEMALE GAZE: “Suzanne Theodora White: In Reverence to the Natural World” by Diana Nicholette Jeon

Trained as a painter, Suzanne Theodora White studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. She was a two-time winner of the prestigious William Paige and Kate Morse Traveling Fellowships, awarded by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. After receiving the first of these awards, she spent over a year on the road traveling alone, overland, through Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Far East. In the 1980’s and 90’s, she made extended trips to South America to study birds in the Amazon basin and Central America.

White has had many solo exhibitions and has been included in group shows over her long career, some of which are listed here: Zoe Gallery in Boston; Cutler/Stavaridis Gallery, Boston; University of Massachusetts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; Art Institute of Boston; Westfield State College, Westfield, MA; Thomas Seal Gallery, Boston, MA; The French Embassy, NY, NY; San Joaquin County Museum, Stockton, CA; and Colby College, Waterville, ME.

In the early 1990s, White was retained by Michel Roux of Carillon Importers as an ‘Absolut Vodka’ artist, and her work has been published and reviewed in USA Today, Connoisseur Magazine, Arts and Antiques, Forbes Magazine, and The Boston Globe, among others. Her work is also published in the textbook ‘Unique Journey/The Visual Arts’ by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Press.

Whites’s work is on permanent display in the Church of St. Denis, Tours, France; Seagram’s, NY, NY; The DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; The Bank of Boston; and the Nichols Institute, Los Angeles, CA. Her work is represented in numerous private collections throughout the United States and Europe.

Sounds of the Forest from the series Dry Stone No Sound Of Water
Collision from the series Drystone No Sound Of Water

Recently, I was invited to curate an online feature for a specific type of work. I’m not really used to thinking of photography in terms of categories such as that, so I turned to some trusted friends who work in those media for suggestions of people who might meet the specific criteria I was working with, Jari Poulin suggested that Suzanne Theodore White would be a good candidate. Although her work did not fit what I needed, it was really the first time I had spent in-depth looking at her work beyond scrolling through Instagram. I realized I knew her—though not well—from Instagram and that we had been interacting for years. But since she doesn’t use her real name as her Instagram handle, I didn’t immediately make the connection until I looked at her Instagram with an eye towards that project.

I thought it would be interesting to present her work here. White’s work is all photographs, but it’s not the kind of photographic work I usually show or we usually see in FRAMES; it’s more of a performance documentation, although it’s not truly performance documentation, either. Her project is ambitious in that she actually creates most of the elements she photographs.

The images show what we might call a form of an altar, but built by her hands from works she collected, painted, photographed, or the land itself. After White photographs these structures, she dissembles them, and they disappear like so much ephemera. It is a curious and different way of working. White’s viewpoint of her work as an artist is interesting, because she thinks like a painter rather than a photographer making observations. So, I thought it was time to show this work to FRAMES readers. I asked her to detail her projects in a couple of sentences, which immediately followed this paragraph. I’m venturing to guess that the work is different than most of what you see. I hope you enjoy seeing White’s work and reading her thoughts about her practice.

Quarantined from The Unguarded Moment
Quarantined from The Unguarded Moment

The Unguarded Moment represents a critical juncture when one discovers an ecstatic moment but simultaneously becomes vulnerable to danger, particularly in nature.

The Sacred Grandmother is my quest for a personal belief system and a reference to my familial connection to the farm. The farm was in my family in the 1850s, but we did not know of that when we purchased it.

Dry Stone No Sound of Water: Using archival images I’ve taken on the farm over 40 years, I examine past, present, and changes to the land. It is an homage to T.S. Eliot and concerns our increasing cultural disconnect from nature.

The Weight of Memory: The Shifting Baseline Syndrome is the idea in which knowledge about the natural world is lost over time. Because of the short span of human life, people don’t perceive changes occurring in nature. Each generation lives within its own “new normal.” What will happen when we no longer remember?

Up See Daisy from the series The Weight of Memory
Herd from the series The Weight of Memory

DNJ: Tell us about your childhood.

STW: My childhood was great despite more than my share of trauma. My family was my mother and sister, and we moved around often. However, we landed, for a chunk of time, in a working-class neighborhood outside of Boston, a neighborhood of triple-decker houses and paved yards. My mother, as a divorcee, was the community scandal. It was the 1950s and the heyday of street games, dodgeball, and kick the can. There were 42 children between the ages of 7 and 12 on my block; there was always someone to play with. If you were unlucky to be ‘it’ in a hide-and-seek game, you would likely be ‘it’ forever. It was a marvelous time to be a kid. We could roam the neighborhood and beyond at will. When I was in second grade, Laurie Mullen and I played hooky to walk from Wollaston to Quincy to see the word ‘shit’ engraved on the cement sidewalk.

I started drawing when I could pick up a pencil or crayon (about age two or three) and never stopped. In coloring books, I drew outside of the lines. While no artists were in my family, my desire to draw and paint was fortunately encouraged. My mother signed me up for art lessons when I was seven, even though it was financially challenging for the family. I continued to take lessons until high school when I could attend art classes.

Untitled from Stillness series
Untitled from Stillness series
Untitled from Stillness series

DNJ: What were you like as a child?

STW: I was a tomboy and independent because I had to be at that time. I had big dreams. I wanted to be president or an astronaut. (I got the reality check once I entered junior high). It was the Cold War era, with bomb shelters in the backyard and duck-and-cover drills in school.

As a consequence, I remember being hypersensitive to nature. There wasn’t much of it around the neighborhood, but there was a fragment of spindly trees in a vacant lot behind a neighbor’s house. It became my Garden of Eden, where I would play and watch the urban fauna. The fragility of my life, the concept of my mortality, was prominent in my thoughts.

My Grandmother’s Dress from The Sacred Grandmother

DNJ: When did you figure out art was your career path, and how did that happen?

STW: Because I was always drawing or painting, family and friends assumed I would grow up to be an artist, but I rebelled. Upon entering college in California, I majored in engineering and philosophy. Thanks to an influential art teacher, Larry Walker, who set me up with my first real and private studio on campus, I switched my major to the arts by my second year. Then, in a lucky confluence of events, I was able to transfer to The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where I studied painting. My experience with photography was dating a photographer. I hung around in that department and was introduced to many amazing artists and incredible new and old works. For a short while, I lived in a communal house full of people who were photographers. There were original Walker Evans prints on the walls. It was the beginning of the Boston School era and an exhilarating creative time.

Memory of a Tree from Meditations

DNJ: If you weren’t an artist, what career would you choose?

STW: I would like to be an ornithologist and a pilot. I would fly worldwide, studying bird populations with a focus on the Amazonian rainforest, which is itself a work of art.

Against These Ruins from Dry Stone No Sound of Water
The Dry Rock from Dry Stone No Sound of Water
Vanitas from Dry Stone No Sound of Water

DNJ: What led you to choose photography over painting?

STW: I owe a lot to Emmet Gowin, with whom I had a prolonged one-on-one conversation right after I finished my BFA and received a grant from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I was about to embark on an extended period of travel. He planted a seed, and while it may have taken a while to germinate, I set off on the trip with a borrowed Rollei 35. I fell in love with taking pictures during that trip, and while I continued to paint seriously until 2010, I always carried around a camera.

Linneaus from Meditations

DNJ: How much of your art practice is photography vs painting?

STW: I only paint or draw what I need for my photographs. I no longer make paintings, per se. I have difficulty with my eyes, so fine work while painting for an extended period is challenging.

On Guard from Meditations

DNJ: WRT to the set building you do for the recent series, do you ever show the installations you made along with the images, or are they ephemeral things that are gone once you have the image you envisioned?

STW: At this time, my constructions are ephemeral. Once I have the shot, I tear it down. I like that it isn’t permanent. I like how the lens frames the construction. I like the existential performative act of crushing, tearing, and folding one of my old photographs and then throwing out the pieces. While working on the ‘Dry Stone‘ project, I was the caregiver for my husband, who was in home hospice. I was sad, grieving, exhausted, and angry. There was something about this particular process that was cathartic and satisfying. That isn’t to say I won’t make 3D constructions at some point. I’m thinking about it.

Coin Toss from The Unguarded Moment

DNJ: How/why/when did you start building these installations to photograph?

STW: I started making what I think of as my theaters in 2020, shortly after COVID-19 hit, while working on my MFA at Maine Media College. I had to think locally regarding my work, so I focused on my farm, which I have lived on for 40-some-odd years. During most of that time, I raised sheep. In 2021, I was ultimately forced to sell my flock due to 7 years of drought conditions and rising hay prices. It was then that I started to think of my constructions as theaters, and I used my work to express my grief over the loss of my sheep and farming identity. It was the end of a story in my book. I took up the constructions, thinking of them as another form of storytelling, using artifacts I have found and photographs taken over a long time as I documented changes on the land immediately surrounding me. Climate disruption was uppermost in my mind, and I needed to vent my anxiety. I am a traveler through the Anthropocene from a fixed point on the map, my farm.

Quarantined from The Unguarded Moment

DNJ: What challenges do you face as a photographer?

STW: My challenges as an artist now are primarily physical. At 72 years old, I have medical issues that limit what I can do and how long I can work. I would love to be able to afford an assistant to help me in the studio as well as outdoors. I have a project called ‘The Sacred Grandmother,’ a series of installations around a huge boulder, an erratic plunked on the farm during the last ice age. I have plans that will require help.

The Sacred Grandmother 1 from The Sacred Grandmother

DNJ: Do you always have a concept when you start a project, or do you shoot and allow the images to tell you what the project that emerges will be?

STW: I work almost entirely with my intuition. I let my process take me down a path, and it’s not until after I have some work under my belt that I realize the thread of an idea. I think of it as a conversation. I let my studio work, and my camera work reveal a direction. I try to discipline myself to work every day. I learn the most from my many failures.

Sacred Grandmother from The Sacred Grandmother

DNJ: Where do the ideas you work with come from? How do they influence each other if they do?

STW: An artist is never off duty. One’s life is art. My ideas mostly come from interacting with the land, but sometimes from poetry and other readings. Also, if an artist has been working for a long time like me, there is a lot of history to plunder. I bring all my experience to the studio. My life’s work is all interconnected. What I am doing now is related to some of my paintings from the 80s and 90s. It is fascinating and surprising to me how work from my past pops up again and again in my current work, re-imagined and re-framed.

In the End from The Dry Stone No Sound of Water

DNJ: You work with different styles in photography. How do you determine which is best for any given project?

STW: This is a fascinating question because I don’t think of myself as working in different styles. It is all a part of an ongoing conversation. I am comfortable with abstraction and realism and love integrating the two.

These Fragments from Dry Stone No Sound of Water

DNJ: You’ve spent many years addressing land and climate issues. What brought you to making such work?

STW: Climate and environmental issues have been on my mind since childhood. I loved being out in nature when I had the opportunity. Each summer, we traveled to Maine to stay at a family house built by my 3-x great-grandfather in the 1800s. It was a huge house shared by all descendants on a lake in a largely wooded area. It was my idea of heaven on earth. It is where I was formally introduced to the natural world by my cousin Gertrude, the elder statesperson of the family. Together, we explored. I learned about the flora and fauna of this part of Maine.

Nowadays, the area is built up, birds and plants have diminished, and I feel the loss. I am reminded of the words of Dag Hammarskjold, who spoke of ‘the burden of sight in a disfigured world.’ I don’t know whether or not it is unusual. Still, as a child, I remember being hyper-aware of and concerned by things like farm fields being carved up for houses, overcrowded beaches, pollution, and, of course, the threat of nuclear annihilation. I vividly remember the tragedy of Minamata and mercury poisoning and not being able to eat swordfish. My attachment to the natural world was as fierce back then as now, and my work has addressed the subject more often than not over the years.

What Branches Grow from Dry Stone No Sound of Water

DNJ: What do you hope the viewer takes from your work?

STW: I hope the beauty will first seduce a viewer. I believe in beauty as it adds shape to the world we live in, to paraphrase Robert Adams. I want viewers to keep looking at an image over time and be disturbed as they become immersed in the work.

Being an artist is itself an act of optimism. We are putting art out into the world to live beyond our short lives—to communicate. The urge to make marks is a deep human impulse. Works by the human hand are saying I was here, I am here, I will be here. We are speaking to the past, present, and future.

Remains from The Weight of Memory
Pendulum from The Weight of Memory

DNJ: What is next on the horizon for you?

STW: I’m not sure, which to me is exciting. I think I will make some of my pieces into discrete installations and see where that takes me.

I hope FRAMES readers enjoyed learning about White’s unique work and how she thinks about making it. Thank you, Suzanne, for your insight into your practice. I look forward to seeing what you do next.

Memory and Desire from Dry Stone No Sound of Water

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