In memory of Susan Ernest

SUSAN ERNEST
June 15, 1950 – September 3, 2024

For two years, from June 2022 to June 2024, Susan posted around 100 photos of her paintings, sketches, and a few spontaneously arranged installation images on an Instagram account. The earliest works date from the late 1970s, while the most recent are brand new—paintings completed in 2022 and 2023. On June 4, 2022, she wrote in a comment:

"I decided a few weeks ago to do a page with only the artworks, it was an interesting exercise because now I see very clearly who I am – artistically speaking."

The images are not arranged chronologically, but most are dated, and in the captions, she has also specified the technique and titles. For several of the slightly older paintings, she wrote brief notes about who currently owns the work. Even though she claimed to see her artistic identity clearly through this compilation, it does not at all have the character of a final statement or retrospective. Instead, it feels like a joyful and somewhat random exhibition—something she did alongside her real work, which was, of course, painting. I cannot know what Susan herself saw when she compiled her works from different periods, but I think I can discern both recurring themes and shifts or disruptions. An artistic career develops and changes over time. Art, if anything, is a relationship—a dialogue with the historical context in which it is created.

Susan was born into an intensely art-interested environment. On a personal level, both of her parents were or would become practicing artists. On a societal level, she was born into a time that projected newfound hope and modernity onto both art and the generation of children who—like Susan—were born after World War II. Her father, John Ernest, was part of the British constructivists, a group of artists working in an abstract tradition inspired by mathematics and systems theory. Abstract art struggled to gain acceptance in Britain, but perhaps for that very reason, those who truly dedicated themselves to it never gave up on its relevance. Susan’s mother, Elna Ernest, also painted in the abstract school, though her engagement with art came later.

Susan grew up in London but moved to Gothenburg in her twenties. She began studying at the Valand Academy of Fine Arts in 1979, just as the school was being integrated into the University of Gothenburg.

During the 1970s, Valand’s art school was politically influenced, much like the rest of the art world. However, at this time, the school's main teachers were often engaged in exploring the potential of painting, even beyond purely representational forms. The Gothenburg Colorists still had some influence. But for the emerging generations, art was supposed to meansomething, to reference the social, political, and tangible realities—especially the realities of labor and political resistance.

The two versions of The Mad Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (1982) specifically reference the resistance of women under Argentina’s military dictatorship—women who refused to be silenced when their loved ones were abducted, imprisoned, and murdered. These paintings contain figurative elements—stern faces emerging from a dreamlike, or in a more art-historical sense, surrealist landscape. In one version, they seem to break free from an indifferent water surface, while the other rather depicts a desert landscape. Cubist elements point to a specific modernist tradition, but abstraction is found more in the composition than in the subject matter, with a set of geometric figures hovering in the mid-layer of the image’s depth.

During the 1980s and 90s, Susan created several public artworks in Gothenburg and its surrounding municipalities. Her works were acquired by the Swedish Public Art Agency, and she exhibited at galleries both in Gothenburg and across Sweden. In the 1990s, she left Gothenburg, moved back to the UK, but eventually settled in Sóller, Mallorca, where she continued painting and exhibiting.

From the 1980s onward, Susan’s paintings often displayed a vivid use of color—she seemed to have an intense relationship with color itself. At times, a playful naivety emerged in patterns of flying saucers, cherries, spirals, stripes, televisions, or leaf formations. Like many great predecessors, nature’s forms were central to her work, but there was always an element of geometric calculation—the eternal question of how the two-dimensional picture plane can accommodate depth and three dimensions.

She frequently worked with the tension between the illusion of depth and flatness, as if they were two separate elements or logics in conflict. This is also how I interpret another recurring motif: the pot—a simple everyday object that is simultaneously a source, enclosing and separating, dividing earth from water, structuring and ordering the world.

I do not know if this is what Susan saw when she compiled her artworks—perhaps she would have described her painting, the passage of time, or her choices of composition and color in entirely different terms. The only thing we know is that the images remain, speaking in their divided tongues, in as many languages as there are viewers.

Kajsa Widegren