Susan Derges’s (SD) new work Under the Moon was shown at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York during January and February of this year. Here David Chandler (DC), Director of Photoworks, asks her about this work and her evolving engagement with nature and natural processes.

DC: Your new work seems related to your earlier River Taw series, but the presence of the moon seems to radically alter the quality of the images. The moon immediately brings a sense of space into the work, a depth, so that we begin to read the images as ‘landscapes’ in a more traditional sense, with a horizon, implied if not seen. I have always read the River Taw work as flat and shallow – the space of the river – and of water on paper, watermarks, to be hung vertically to emphasise this sense of surface disturbance. But now it seems the work has opened out, but it is also more static, like a nocturne. As the new works began to emerge, were you conscious of these implications and the relation the work might have? Specifically, to a melancholic English landscape tradition, and the work of artists such as Samuel Palmer, for example?

SD: Yes they are related to the River Taw series, but in fact, there was a transitional group of prints made in Scotland last winter when I was working along a stretch of the River Findhorn called The Streens. The landscape was so bare and exposed to the sky that the ‘above’ became as important as the ‘below’ and that was a very different experience to the covered, rather secret places I had been working in along the Taw. The way I had been making those images – exposing the paper while submerged in the river to flashlight at night – became frustratingly limited in terms of the space or depth of field that photograms are capable of providing. I began to look for a way to extend the space in the image to an almost infinite depth while keeping all of the magical detail of the flow forms and undergrowth at the same time. So yes, I was looking for a space that would be more painterly than photographic in terms of the possibilities of an ambiguous surface. One that would combine sky and ground without a horizon or vanishing point – where looking down into the water could suddenly flip into an experience of looking up through it to the sky and moon. It would also be a far more internal or imagined space than in previous work due to giving up the process-led way of making the images. The new work was made in the darkroom by projecting transparencies of the sky and moons down through water onto paper that was overshadowed by branches that were resonating to sound and transmitting vibration patterns into the water. I have often felt that the night landscape around here is very evocative of Palmer and other romantic painters, and of early Mondrians too, but the references for working out the construction of the images were a lot more to do with an oriental quality of space. Particularly the woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, where bodies of water seamlessly dissolve into sky, often in night scenes where highly patterned or abstract details are illuminated by distant light sources. Also, the notion of a journey or a passage of time unfolding across a series of images, rather than the single or selected moment.

DC: You mention the ‘giving up’ of a process-led approach to making work in this new series. This seems to me to have quite far reaching implications because I have always associated ‘process’ in your work with an affinity to experimentation, in a scientific sense as much as an artistic one. To a certain extent, you have always been interested in making nature’s processes visible fairly directly, or at least exploring their visual potential from a position which has drawn quite heavily from scientific ideas about the interconnectedness of matter, and of nature and culture. Much of this interest still seems to be present in the new work – you mention “branches that were resonating to sound […] transmitting vibration patterns into the water” – which harks back to earlier experiments with sound waves. Does this move to a more consciously constructed form of working now open things out for you? Is there a sense, perhaps, in which that kind of purist approach (for want of a better term!) is something you no longer feel bound to conceptually?

SD: Yes, or rather, No. I do not feel so bound by that approach […] but when I first started working with natural processes in the landscape, it felt like being liberated from all the baggage carried not only by the medium of photography but also by the self. It was an approach that allowed the maker to act more as a facilitator or channel through which natural events could be made visible – with minimal intervention from the author of the work. After a while though, this became another kind of limitation or constraint and felt as if the self was being wilfully excluded. But if you regard the self or one’s mental world as much a natural process like everything else in nature, then the internal imaginative events are as interesting as say, the flow forms in the river. And that could mean going with the desire to make particular kinds of images that would need to be constructed as they are imagined rather than existing in the outside world. Because we construct internally with the things we have seen and experienced outside – as in dreaming – the imagery and language will inevitably connect with personal experiences. I suppose that is why sound vibration patterns have become part of the new work – they were such an important insight or way of visualising ‘interconnectedness’. It feels as if I am in the midst of it now with this work rather than outside, using experimentation and metaphors from science to represent an idea of it, as in the earlier prints.

DC: I think it’s interesting that you refer to dreams and to the personal in the context of dreaming. It seems to go against the drift in current art towards an everyday material reality: a kind of personal experience where the profound is located (if anywhere) in the banality of contemporary life. For most of us, when we think of nature now, it requires a kind of leap of faith to imagine it in all its complexity, immensity, power etc. (it may be why so many people are drawn to the sea, as the one accessible contact with some kind of primal force). Consequently, so much art now that deals with nature seems preoccupied with ironic perceptions of it – how the idea has been debased and compromised by culture or lost altogether, and how, therefore, our representations have become formulaic. More about pictures (and values) rather than experience itself. In a sense, you have always held faith with a kind of magical wonder in contemplating, and being part of, the processes of nature. An attitude, within which, irony seems irrelevant since it is so much about contact with, and observation of, a materiality which is not manufactured. It is as if, in your work, experience as process bypasses questions about the nature of experience and perception that seem to preoccupy so many artists. It also seems to me that your home on the fringes of Dartmoor (and your choice of this place as a creative base) must have played a very important role in maintaining this sense of an ‘everyday’ bound to natural forces. An elemental reality that might be experienced directly and personally.

SD: I don’t feel that my work bypasses these questions about the nature of experience and perception. In fact, the earlier work, made before I moved to Devon, was very much about the relationship of oneself to the unfolding of external events, but I would agree that the exploration was very different. I used science as a source of imagery and metaphor which provided another way into these issues and a lot of the experiments I appropriated in my work were from a period of science when wonder was still a valid response to the world. Now, although those metaphors seem increasingly less necessary in the work, there is a strong desire to keep the wonder and magic of that particular gaze. I can understand why so much contemporary art focuses on an ironic, fragmented or alienated perception of nature but, as you’ve said, I have consciously sought out the opposite – inclusion, relationship, belonging. My desire for these things seems to relate to a wider need for myths and metaphors of a holistic rather than mechanistic or reductive nature and Dartmoor as a creative base does feed these concerns. It’s actually a very constructed landscape where its sustainability as an environment and a community is continually being worked out and fought for. It’s a kind of microcosm for the larger issues but also a place where it’s possible to dissolve the boundaries a little between internal and external nature in all its complexity.

DC: Perhaps you could say a little more about this – about the relationship in your work between the interior and exterior. It has always seemed to me that the body is a constant presence. Not just in the sense that your working processes have often had a performative aspect, but also in the way you embrace systems of growth and decay, of flow and interchange – as you have said, you can see the workings of the imagination as flow forms from a river. And, seeing nature in terms of the body brings us back to the continual sense of both micro and macro scales in your work.

SD: The size of the prints are body scale in terms of their long, thin, vertical format and I would hope that prevents any sense of looking through an aperture but rather suggests a more direct relationship, or experience of immersion in the image. In the making, too, there is a very physical experience of working with the water and branches in the darkroom. How the works were made is not particularly important for anyone to know, but as method always resonates with the ideas it might help answer your question to stress that I was not going out into the landscape to make prints in the river at night, as with the earlier photograms, but actually brought photographs I had made of the moon into the darkroom, combining them with direct prints of water and branches that were vibrated by sound. All of which sounds rather strange, but it was an attempt to make visible the relationships between the moon, water, living matter and, by implication, the observer. They were put together much in the way that the unconscious might construct dreamt or imagined imagery, and it hasn’t surprised me that people say they are reminded of dreams, fairytales and early memories on first looking at the prints. In the process of making, I became fairly obsessed with the changing cycles of the moon and particular places in the landscape that I was visiting while thinking about the work. It became very easy to move between a kind of internal landscape of imagined and metaphorical imagery and the external counterpart. Neither seemed more real than the other, they seemed to inform each other in a way that was more fluid than before. The macro cycles of the moon and external nature became identified with the changing states of the microcosm of the self – hopefully not as purely autobiographical records but of a more archetypal or universal nature.