Tumultuous eddies, distortions of light and color, lend a surreal quality to Susan Hockaday’s abstract photography.
By: Susan Van Dongen
Coming from a long line of artistic souls, Susan Hockaday was encouraged from childhood to let her creative mind roam. You can see it in her artwork. Images frolic and cartwheel across the space, or else snake around, flirting with the eye. Whether she’s making paper, prints, drawings or abstract photographs, there’s something playful about her work.
Last summer, while staying at her summer home on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada, her latest experiment involved laying on the ground pointing her camera upward while her son threw seaweed in the air.
"Sometimes the thing thrown in the air would land on the person taking the picture," she says, chuckling. She has an example of her "flying seaweed" picture displayed in her third-floor studio just off Nassau Street in Princeton, and the greenish-yellow kelp seems to tumble against a robin’s-egg-blue sky.
The photographs of flying flotsam are still works-in-progress, though, part of a creative "system" the methodically minded woman hasn’t perfected yet.
"Sometimes people get confused with my work," Ms. Hockaday says. "I set up circumstances steering but not controlling what will happen."
One technique she seems to have mastered can be seen in Ms. Hockaday’s latest exhibit, titled Water, at the Anne Reid Art Gallery at Princeton Day School. The show, which runs Jan. 20 through Feb. 21, features the artist’s oversized, hand-printed abstract color photography, filled with organic subject matter from the landscape and waterways near her summer home.
Ms. Hockaday, who once earned a living as a medical artist, makes semi-abstract, semi-botanical and scientific drawings, places them under water and makes a picture. She then rearranges the subject matter and makes a double exposure of the original. The result is a tumultuous combination of the natural ripples and eddies in the water which give the drawings a surreal quality to begin with as well as distortions of light and color, mixed with rocks, foliage and anything else that might drift into the shot.
"The final image becomes a transparent intertwined imagery, with everything seeming half real and half illusory," wrote New York Times critic Barry Schwabsky of a previous show in Morristown. "The viewer seeks to identify some one layer of substantial reality amidst all these shadows but the eye and mind are kept moving restlessly, never allowed to fix on any one of them."
Indeed, layers of things have played a major role in Ms. Hockaday’s work for many years and in many different mediums especially when she was doing print and paper making.
"It all goes back to the layers I worked with from printmaking, which were of colors and ink," she says. "Now it’s layers of imagery.
"(I like finding a way) to create layers, which seems to be the way I think about things this is the way I see the world," she says, reflecting on her undergraduate studies in human physiology, where she pored over the various strata and systems of the body. "I love the aesthetics of science. The structures and intellectual systems are fascinating but are also very beautiful."
"I like taking things and making them into these tangles," Ms. Hockaday says. "You see a lot of things clumped together or tangled up on the beach mussels, dried kelp, twigs, berries. It’s a useful metaphor. I wanted to gather disparate things and set up a conversation between them."
For example, to the casual viewer, "Halfway Brook 8" looks like a mishmash of blue and brown squiggles. Closer observation, however, reveals groupings of twigs and vines, bubbles in the water and lichen. One photograph has tiny bugs skittering across the surface. All this is juxtaposed against Ms. Hockaday’s drawings and disguised by the double exposure.
"I like to jog the viewer out of that sense of being able to identify something because when you can identify something specifically, you stop looking at it with fresh eyes," she says. "I want people to see their own kind of stuff."
Born and raised in St. Louis, Mo., Ms. Hockaday comes from a large family almost entirely comprised of artists, photographers, architects and designers. Her grandfather was Charles Voorhees, one of the early American Impressionists from Old Lyme, Conn. Architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller was one of her mother’s cousins.
"There were about 15 artists just in my own generation," she says. "I had my period of rebellion studying the sciences, but I ended up combining science and art. I thought I would be a medical artist and for a while I did drawings for cardiac surgeons."
Moving east with her husband a professor of organic chemistry at Princeton University Ms. Hockaday has studied various aspects of applied art and photography at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Yale University, the Pratt Graphics Center in New York, the Amsterdam Graphics Atelier in Holland, Princeton University, and the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts in Boston.
She has exhibited in the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan, and is represented in New York by Viridian Artists Inc. Her awards include two fellowships from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Princeton University Art Museum, Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton and Johnson & Johnson headquarters in New Brunswick.
Ms. Hockaday chaired the board of directors at the Viridian Gallery in New York and Artworks in Trenton. In 1980 and 1983, she gave lecture tours in China. She has also exhibited and lectured on Chinese art in Princeton and New York. She lives with her husband in faculty housing near the university, decorated with her own artwork as well as pieces collected along the couple’s foreign travels.
She names Henri Matisse, Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock as a few influences but admits her sources "don’t fall into any particular pattern."
"I like Japanese and Chinese art," Ms. Hockaday says. "I’ve always liked maps and aerial photography. Growing up in a house filled with my grandfather’s Impressionist paintings, I’ve always loved painters like Bonnard, who used a lot of those kinds of colors. I so very much admired the way Monet created his landscapes. The fact that he went out and built the landscape in order to transform it through painting was just an extraordinary achievement. The transformations of the natural world have always been fascinating to me.
"My artwork is a tool for exploring the natural world and expresses my fascination with patterns of landscape or some part of it," she writes in her artist’s statement. "For the last 10 years, I have worked with painted cutouts, drawings and photographs. Each medium involves a different focus, but all reflect patterns apparent in the botanical clutter around us."
Although the images are playful, the actual execution of the work is serious business for Ms. Hockaday. Just printing the 30-by-40 inch color photographs was arduous, and involved traveling to Printspace in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan several times a week, where the professionals guided her, slowly but surely.
"I was happy if I could just make two prints in a day," she says.
Ms. Hockaday looks upon the winter as the work portion of the year her time in "the lab." Spring is for generating new ideas, and the summers in Cape Breton are for experimenting with those thoughts.
"A lot of my creativity involves a sense of play and a sense of experimenting," she says. "But it’s also about using these tools or creative systems to make discoveries. I feel like I’m always setting up situations where I can make discoveries. Then I can pass those along to other people."
Susan Hockaday’s abstract photography is on view at the Anne Reid Art Gallery, Princeton Day School, 650 Great Road, Princeton, Jan. 20-Feb. 21. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. For information, call (609) 924-6700. On the Web: www.pds.org