Introduction to The Shape of Decay exhibition catalog:

BEYOND THE ORDINARY: THE ART OF SUSAN BOYE

by Gayle Clemans, Professor of Art History and Art Writing, Co-Chair of the Art Department, Cornish College of the Arts

Naturalism, in Susan Boye’s skilled hands, becomes something more than verisimilitude. Clearly, Boye is extraordinarily adept at rendering observed items, capturing their forms, outlines, textures in watercolor, gouache, pen, or pencil. But she always wants to move a little “beyond realism,” to use her phrase. Indeed, there is a slight sense of the uncanny or surreal as sticks combine to create permeable shields or a single leaf becomes a vast landscape complete with caverns, paths, and rolling hills.  

The three series included in this exhibition — shields, landscapes, and creatures — are all based on carefully observed natural specimens, but they allow ample room for perceptual and imaginative association. These possibilities are amplified by the empty backgrounds, with each subject floating in space, inviting us to focus on the overall forms and the variegated details of shading, line, and color. Boye works simultaneously across each series, compelled by the twist of one of the myriad twigs in her studio or the curl of a leaf found on a walk. Sometimes, at first, it is a purely formal engagement; the visual metaphors come later as a leaf, stick, or pod catches her eye once again, suggesting another form. 

They become, in a way, self-evident. After all, “rendering” can also mean “to make visible” and “to cause to be.” 

Each form, as transformed by Boye, invites us to closely attend to it while it whispers of the attentiveness paid by the artist during her hours and hours of careful rendering. Boye has been a respectful observer and collector of nature since her childhood days on Zealand, the largest island in Denmark. She still has some of the shells and rocks she picked up as a child on the many beaches there. Coming to the Pacific Northwest as an exchange student in college, she marveled at the vast wildernesses and, eventually, made Seattle her home. 

A vastness of scale, belied by the smaller size of the original objects, is embedded in these works of art, along with other contradictions that exist comfortably together. 

Shields, symbols of strength and endurance, become delicate assemblages that suggest vulnerability and ephemerality. These imaginary shields were inspired, in part, by Boye’s interest in armor in general and Viking history in particular. Several of Boye’s large shields take the form and actual size of their big Viking predecessors, complete with a center “boss” or “umbo,” traditionally made of metal or wood, which, for Boye, turns into a deteriorating flower or dry clump of moss.   

The idea for woven shields was initially inspired by a chance encounter with an unusual window in Denmark, where, during a walk, Boye came across an old barn. Instead of having an ordinary glass pane, one window had been repaired with densely woven twigs and hay. Two large drawings in the exhibition catalog are Boye’s interpretations of that architectural patch, recreating and heightening the tension between dilapidation and impenetrability. 

Again and again, Boye subtly “pushes” color or composition to remake observed reality, to remark on the unremarkable. Individual twigs and leaves, desiccated and separated from their sources of life, are beautifully portrayed to suggest movement, conversation, protection, even dance.  

These natural specimens, with life cycles of their own, inhabit Boye’s studio for a long time. To borrow from the Danish, Boye’s native language, we might say that leaves age “naturligvis,” meaning “naturally” but also  “evidently,” or “of course.” Boye observes this obvious, inevitable course of action as the leaves decay, lose their color, and become tightly brittle. She revisits and draws her chosen leaves in different phases and gives them a life beyond. “I’m attracted to the idea that these objects will cease to exist at some point,” she says. “They would have been completely forgotten if I hadn’t picked them up and paid attention to them. They are here for a fleeting moment in time.”