Equal parts historiography and explication of form, Letters delves into the intricacies of public and private language. Tracing a path toward alternative queer histories, Ella Sutherland draws on the sensibilities of clandestine correspondence, medieval illumination and vernacular design to position covert and connective movements across language and through time.
The primary touchstones for the series of paintings Letters are the archival records of personal correspondence exchanged between three female luminaries from the history of English-language literature and their closest female 'confidantes'; Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. In these documents, Sutherland looks to the exchange of sensation and intimacy-that are simultaneously figured and vibrant, and surreptitiously concealed-to consider letterforms and the epistolary notes that house them as pivotal channels for 'fugitive' desire.
Citing the initials of each eminent pairing (excepting Susan Gilbert who remains a silent partner on the historical record), Sutherland's paintings articulate landscapes in which letterforms have become figures, the limbs of type taking on postures that allude to emotion, memory and life. Recurring motifs suggest interiors, thresholds and the accoutrements of concealment; doors, screens and windows fluctuate with foliage and cloud forms, conjuring atmospheres or environments in which one might be hidden in plain sight. This treatment of pictorial space echo's the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval period, in which decorative letterforms were embellished with flora, fauna, human figures, and patterning, to situate the flourishing of elemental and heavenly worlds beyond the confines of the text. Letters is not shy of the long arc of these reference points, preferring a slippery continuum between page and skin (vellum), gesture and word, and connotations of love that are at once both earthly and divine.
Considered in this light, the page as a formal device becomes a vector for a wealth of hidden lifeways. Sutherland's approach to reparative queer genealogy underscores the idea that, at their most expansive, letters are poetic instruments capable of generating movement, agency, furtive communities and power. This is gestured to directly in the largest of the suite of works, What is a Letter? ; mirroring the graphic and poetic methodologies that have shaped the artists approach, abstract page forms curve and fold, stack and stretch their spines open, suggesting the transformation of knowledge across eras and forms. With Letters, Sutherland elevates the craft of concealment to a form of portraiture in itself, memorialising the shifting legibility of language and lovers, as the codes themselves slip in and out of focus.
- Elle Loui August, April 2020
