Seattle Painter Sue Danielson Tells Stories Through Mapmaking

Danielson’s former work related greatly to a sense of place, often reminiscent of home or architectural space.  Creating multifaceted or kaleidoscopic works composed of blocked forms and line, Danielson’s older paintings describe the dynamic tension that often exists between reality and an idyllic sense of home. Prismed shapes, echoing a sense of light and shadow such as through a window or a door, or an abstracted placement of figure and foreground deliver just enough symbolism for us to know where we are. Danielson’s deft ability to catapult us into familiar but unknown location underlies the accompanying sense of dislocation in the work — this is the space where we meet our own narrative about what we call home, what it means to belong, and the fallibility of memory.

In Permeability of Hardness, Danielson’s 2017 show at Bridge Productions, she re-imagined this exploration of recollection and locality on in a more neurological way. In considering the sheer amount of information consumed in the digital postinternet era, Danielson enacts a laborious accumulation and submersion of information beneath the rubble of the new.  As a painter, this process isn’t just an historical storytelling but a gathering and a documentation. Beginning with a series of marks, she layers her materials in a variegated pattern and calligraphic form using acrylic paint, ink, or graphite. Though meditative to stand in front of and view, in practice it is a deliberate, methodical, and taxing effort employing a series of specific choices and dedication. The tangled growth seems to trace a path of travel through space, mimicking the iconography of a city map, but one that is unfathomably complex and detailed — so much so that it becomes a kind of science fiction landscape. In this way, Danielson’s motion-driven meditation carves a mystical space in which we may spend hours in contemplation of the indelible marks we leave on the land, as well as ourselves.