Biography

With a background in Printmedia, Susanna Castleden develops experimental processes associated with image transference and reproduction. Her practice based research evolves through drawing and printmaking utilising large photographic screen prints, relief prints, frottage and etchings. Susanna’s recent research looks at ways of visualising mobility in order to suggest how we might perceive distant and unknown locations. Drawing from imagined or anticipated travel as well as factual tracks and paths of movement, Susanna uses the visual tools of mapping to question our sense of geographical and spatial knowledge. Susanna is the Coordinator of Printmedia in the school of Design and Art at Curtin University, Western Australia and is currently completing a PhD at RMIT

Illustrated Talk

Travelling in the absence of a known itinerary: making a round-the-world print.
It is understood the world is on the move. The globe is encased in the movement of objects, people and goods between, above and through places. In the ever-expanding movement of tourist travel, methods of recording and representing leisure mobility continue to increase. Journeys are recorded photographically, geographically and textually to provide virtual and imaginative travel experiences to interested unknown onlookers. This illustrated talk reflects on a global circumnavigation undertaken without a known itinerary. The circular journey from Rottnest Island in Western Australia to its antipodal counterpart, Bermuda Island, challenged the usual ways in which we come to know and understand the world. As a counterpoint to regular methods of recording travel, this project utilised a tactile printmaking methodology to create a daily visual record that emphasised the corporeal and unfolding voyage. Recording one linear meter a day using a process of reverse frottage, a continuous thirty-meter print was created as a  record of the unknown journey. The continuous print thus acts as a way of tracing a corporeal experience of an unknown journey and suggests a new way of visualising global mobility.

Open Folio

Back and Forth, Give and Take. (Folio of print based collaborative research by Nicole Slatter, Bevan Honey, Bruce Slatter and Susanna Castleden)
This folio of works uses print as the nexus for a collaborative project involving four artists to explore and visualize the geophysical location and conceptual notions of ‘place’. These works bring together ideas of place, time and relational geography to test the possibilities and complexities of location and exchange. Maintaining practices that incorporate printmaking, painting, sculpture, video and drawing, the process of exchange was undertaken to produce a series of works that reflect these themes. Twelve print-based works were generated through the activity of exchange, with each piece aiming to challenge the medium of print via the transference of ideas and process. These process based artworks aim to evade pre-scripted outcomes through the experience of interaction, trade and exchange, drawing upon and challenging each artists understanding of art making. Working from the ‘isolated’ location of Western Australia, this work uncovers how, through studio based research, four artists connect with these themes and respond to the cross disciplinary journey.