Susie Dureau’s My Breath is Like the Tide, from the series Fathoms, is part of the collective body of works entitled Fathoms. The word fathom has two meanings. One is a measurement, and the other is a reckoning. Both require an understanding of the shape of the world around us. Chiefly used to measure the depth of water, a fathom derives from the Old English word meaning outstretched arms and measures the approximate space from fingertip to fingertip across the heart space of an adult human. Fathom also means understanding a complex idea. The word offers an insight into the human condition, not as Western thinkers have previously proposed, a state of mind over body or human over nature but a complex weaving of anatomies and minds, human and landscape together.

My breath is like the tide, an ancient cycle of drawing in and releasing out. The air that animates the body is the same air that filters through the ocean, it is part of the landscape. We are part of the landscape.

Susie says of this work: “The coastal landscape (the environment my body is intricately connected to) offers a compelling sensory field for me to explore my being – this is why I am drawn to it. My painting practice engages a method of cultivated curiosity: slowing down and attuning my senses to the landscape, thereby accessing embodied knowledge that arises from thinking and feeling in unison. 

“Nature speaks to me in nonverbal languages of light, colour, texture, temperature and tone; these are also the languages of painting. Painting is a collaboration between the sensory body, the mind and emotion, the material pigments and ground. Through the artworks in this exhibition, I borrow these languages to fathom a bond between myself and the landscape: a bond that is both commonplace and mystifying.”

Signed on the back.