This painting is from Susie Dureau’s Earth Poems series, a sensory ode to the forces of nature, inviting viewers to experience the profound and nuanced interplay between the natural world and human existence. Each of Susie’s paintings is a new world where personal feeling and perception merge seamlessly with the external processes of the earth. Impressions of tides, light, and weather intertwine with the cyclical rhythms of heartbeat and breath, revealing patterns and connections between the ancient flows of the earth and the flows of the human body.

Susie draws on spectrograms that capture sounds from the Australian landscape, combining this data with personal perception and emotion. The sound of a kookaburra’s laugh is represented through floating, pulsing brush marks. The kookaburra belongs to the Halcyoninae, a family of tree kingfishers whose name evokes a state of happiness, bliss, and carefree tranquility.

Says Susie of this work, “In Kingfisher, impressions of light and weather intertwine with the cyclical rhythms of heartbeat and breath, revealing patterns and connections between the ancient flows of the earth and those of the human body.”