Artist's Statement

Susie Dureau’s work engages the Western landscape tradition while critically extending it beyond its historical role in shaping ideas of ownership and human dominance. Drawing on influences ranging from the atmospheric sublime of nineteenth century Romanticism to the durational practices of Land Art and the gestural materiality of painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, her paintings resist the separation of nature and culture. With deep respect for Indigenous knowledge systems, in which kinship extends beyond the human, her work proposes landscape not as passive resource, but as a living relational field.

Dureau’s paintings operate as portraits of presence, not views of land. Rather than describing terrain, they attend to atmosphere and condition, registering landscape as something encountered and inhabited. Grounded in material process, her practice employs oil paint on linen, often using natural pigments, with surfaces built through layered primings over extended periods. Sound and spectrogram imagery inform the compositional logic of the works, translating auditory experience into colour and shape. In this way, the paintings give form to forces that are typically unseen, positioning landscape as an active perceptual encounter rather than a fixed view.