PROFILE: SUSAN NORRIE
: : Anna Zagala
: : printable
version
At first glance, Susan Norrie might be considered
an odd choice for inclusion in a new media journal. After all, she
has been a practicing artist for more than twenty years across various
media including painting, installation and still photography. In
the last decade Norrie has turned her hand to video installation,
quietly creating a significant body of work that has elaborated on
the theme of natural and man-made disasters. Along with her other
works, these have always been exhibited within a gallery context.
I make this point because although new media has singularly embraced
the possibilities of new technologies and virtual or immersive environments,
it has been more circumspect about its place in the institutional
structures of the public gallery. But for the moment put questions
of categorisation and context to one side. Consider this: Norrie
has consistently utilised new technologies in her video installations
to create complex multiple-screen and sound installations that immerse
the viewer in a kind of sublime spectacle.
Enola is her most recent video
installation, made for the 2004 Biennale of Sydney. Like passenger (2003), Undertow (2002)
and Thermostat (2001) before it, Enola (2004)
continues Norrie’s fascination with environmental devastation
wrought by humans. Norrie’s previous videos edited together
her own digital video footage with archival tape – an oil
spill in Russia, the bubbling mud lakes of Rotorua, a scientist
releasing a weather balloon, Melbourne’s wild sandstorm – into
melancholic meditations on the world’s damaged landscapes.
In a kind of mirroring, the monumental scale of Norrie’s
video investigations into global disorder has often been reflected
in the monumental scale of the installations themselves.
Enola then, is a certain departure
for Norrie. Inspired, in the first instance, by Kenzo Tange’s
children’s library built in Hiroshima shortly after the
war, Enola (the name refers to the B-29 bomber, Enola
Gay, that dropped the atomic bomb on the city in 1945) takes
the form of a cinema for children. In the MCA space, small stools
are arranged around a screen which plays a looped film of an
enchanting miniature world. Norrie shot the footage at an architectural
theme park in Nikko, Japan, where over a hundred buildings, from
St Peter’s Basilica to the World Trade Centre, from the
Horyu-ji Temple to the Eiffel Tower, have been built to scale
and set in a garden of landscaped bonsai. Slow motion, the camera
pans dreamily past these global monuments to culture, past the
frozen human figurines, set to the muzak strains of Burt Bacharach’s Walk
On By and Disney’s It’s a Small World (the
song originally accompanied Disney’s Magic Kingdom’s
most popular attraction, It’s a Small World, a
musical room-by-room boat tour through the nations of the world).
Yet it’s an uneasy captivation. There’s
the presence of hooded figures, two Japanese women, towering
over this world, scanning the horizon as though on watch. The
persistent sound of bells tolling. The digital image bleaching
out. By juxtaposing these elements with the Disney classic, Enola alludes
to the destruction of Hiroshima and offers a sly critique of
imperialism. Most vivid however, is Norrie’s capacity for
inflecting the work with child-like wonder. Through the simple
technique of panning across the surfaces of Nikko’s miniature
architectural icons – a form of reconstructed landscape – Enola presents
a fragile celebration of humanity’s resilience and its
remarkable capacity for survival. |
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Susan Norrie
ENOLA, 2004
DVD video
image courtesy of the artist and Mori Gallery, Sydney
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