Susan Blake - "Pretty Many Coffins"

I am primarily a painter. I structure my paintings around geometric pattern and repetition. A mindful attention to craft is an important element of my work.  

What I enjoyed most about making an artwork for this unusual show is that it provoked  me to take creative risks and to hone an idea. Being given the artistic freedom to create  nearly whatever I wanted from one large sheet of plywood felt like the curators had  thrown down a gauntlet. One Sheet challenged me to push my painting beyond the  rectangular and off the wall. The result is Pretty Many Coffins. As the title suggests, it  contains multiples of coffins, or rather coffin shapes, 2,492 in all. 

I was compelled by the size (8 feet long) and material (wood) of my one sheet to  embrace the idea of ‘coffin’ as the subject for my artwork. I was further inspired by my  recent preoccupation with the trappings of interment including personalized coffins,  which can be quite glitzy, as well as the decoration of Egyptian sarcophagi and  bejeweled reliquaries. In short, Pretty Many Coffins is my cathartic response to the  conflicting feelings I have during this crazy time of profound uncertainty. 

My artwork is based on the marriage of opposites: positive vs negative forms and their  vertical vs horizontal arrangement, warm vs cool color, dark vs light and so on. While  an upright ‘coffin’ leans against the wall like those of the Wild West, its negative  counterpart on the floor evokes a burial plot with its gaping dark cutout. My work  entices with the pleasure of pattern. At the same time it confronts—or brings down to  ‘earth’ so to speak—the discomfort of experiencing coffin shapes at human scale.  

The coffin image is a potent and familiar trope that is prone to cliche. For this reason I  felt that I must embrace it wholeheartedly, to tap into its power to evoke a wide range of  associations and emotion—from mourning and loss to a kitschy style of manicure. The  biggest challenge for me in creating Pretty Many Coffins was that of acknowledging the  coffin’s potential for cliche while risking turning my work into a cliche.