Curator Petra Halkes for Ottawa Art Gallery
Born in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Susan Feindel studied painting at Mount Allison and travelled the world before settling in Ottawa in 1973. She recently returned to Nova Scotia and lives in Chester Basin.
Figura includes paintings and drawings produced since 1983, which re-enact nature’s creativity rather than mimicking natural appearances. Referring to the artist’s impulse to transform matter, Petra Halkes writes that, “Through paint — with its propensities so similar to water, mud, blood and excrement — Feindel seeks to recover the human kinship with the movement and historicity of nature, in order to encounter nature as a figure in her own right.” She goes on to suggest that Feindel’s images of land and sea contribute, in a uniquely visual and visceral way, to ecological thought.
