Visual Equivalents: exploring mind and matter in print
Clifford Chance, 10 Upper Bank Street, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5JJ
20th January – 27th February 2025
Susan Aldworth has been making prints for more than 30 years. This show, curated by Gill Saunders (formerly Senior Curator of Prints at the V&A Museum), is the first survey to look at the span of Aldworth’s key print projects from 2000 to the present day. Working mostly in series, she uses her chosen techniques – etching, lithography, monotype and cyanotype – to explore the chemistry of the brain and the sense of self. Inventive and experimental, she has been adept in finding ways and means to give substance to the intangible and the immaterial, creating visual equivalents derived from the materials and processes of printmaking itself. More recently she has partnered with a scientist to explore alchemy, a magical mythical process of transformation aptly mirrored by etching, with its unpredictable mix of inks and acids, metals and resists.
Her subjects range from consciousness, where we see the brain at work with the neural pathways pulsing and sparking, to the brain in turmoil, disrupted by epileptic seizures which strike ‘out of the blue’. The mind suspended in sleep, yet active with dream and nightmare, is the subject of the series The Dark Self. In the sombre sequence of monoprints, A Puff of Smoke, grief is pictured as a nebulous knot of pain overwhelming the mind. Harnessing process to imagination, Susan Aldworth’s evocative prints help us to picture the emotions and sensations that animate the mind and define the self.
