Sue Lorraine
Biography 2023
I make jewellery and objects.
My arts practice spans over forty-years and I am a partner and founding member of Gray Street Workshop.
From 1999-2008 I was the Creative Director of the Metal Design Studio, JamFactory Adelaide and in 2008 the Chair of the JMGA SA Inside/out International Conference Committee. From 2009-2021 I worked for Arts South Australia, the state government’s business unit within the Department of the Premier and Cabinet, first as the Public Art and Design Arts Development Officer and then as a Grants Officer.
For seven years from 2010-2017, I was the curator of the exhibition program at Gray Street Workshop Gallery. The gallery was a launch pad for many emerging artists and together with Catherine Truman and Jess Dare we presented a calendar of exhibitions and events that challenged and inspired our audiences.
In 2021 I resumed a fulltime studio practice.
I am currently represented by The National, Christchurch, New Zealand, Gallery Funaki, Melbourne, Zu Design, Adelaide and Tereza Seabra Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal. I was also represented by Galerie Ra, Amsterdam, up until the gallery’s closure in 2019.
I have exhibited at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art and Kyoto, National Museum of Modern Art through the Asialink Touring program, at the London, Design Museum in the Australian exhibition Unexpected Pleasures and at the Dowse, Lower Hutt, New Zealand in the exhibition The Language of Things.
My work is held in the collections of most Australian state galleries.
Sue Lorraine
September 2023
Artist Statement 2023
My practice revolves around my relationship with objects and their potential and power to hold and to assign meaning and memory.
I strive to make work that is personal but with a degree of abstraction, work that is sometimes wearable, sometimes not, sometimes solid, other times fragile, often small, on occasions large, always thoughtful, never rushed and made with skill and refinement.
For quite some time, I was interested in how we shaped our relationship and understanding of science, biology and physics through public collections. I was particularly fascinated by the role of the scientific model as a means of making tangible the past and the future; the micro and the macro. Based on this research and observation I created works that offered another interpretation, that were part science, part engineering, part specimen and part whimsy. I enjoy mixing historical and contemporary issues, traditional and non-traditional materials, to create my own index of objects.
I have considerable experience working with mild steel in a style that is graphic and minimal. More recently I have been incorporating found objects and materials into my pieces and am interested in the conversational possibilities these materials add to the work.
In 2017 I created a body of work for a solo show titled Precisely. This exhibition was a tribute to my late father, architect and artist Hans Lorraine, and was born from a place that was more intimate and personal than earlier collections of work. Anne Brennan in her essay to accompany the exhibition described the work as a “tender posthumous conversation with a man who in life was difficult to know.”
The works in Precisely drew together a lifetime of creative and emotional threads; the materials, the processes and the resulting objects were all about slowing things down, holding the memories still, enjoying the making, reflecting on time, understanding the relationship and sharing the story.
I began to look at objects more intimately, specifically the modest things that he owned and held. From there my work took on a more personal and familiar approach and embraced the use of objects, found, bequeathed, unearthed and gifted.
One of the things that was particular about my father was his relationship to time, his anxiety about time, being on time, having enough time, marking time.
I began to ponder the way we measure time, the past, present and future and how we also measure more intangible feelings and emotions. This resulted in the exhibition Measured, which was shown at Funaki, Melbourne in 2019.
During the pandemic I had a chance to reflect and build on this collection of work, the outcome Measured #2 was shown at The National, Christchurch, New Zealand in August 2022. In this body of work, I explored our ever-changing relationship to the measurable and unmeasurable aspects of time, distance and safety. Using a variety of materials and found objects to create a cacophony of works that act as a witness to the new not so normal world we now find ourselves in, to create a library of artifacts for the archives of the future.
In 2023 I had a chance to revisit the object and artworks of my father’s making a new body of work to sit alongside the oils and water colours he painted from the early 1950s until his death in 2012. The works in the show were quite personal and specific to my memory of him and I think he would have enjoyed the gentle creative banter. The exhibition title Drawn Out was show at WAS Gallery Warragul.
My creative process is rather fluid, where I start and where I end up is not always an obvious trajectory; it’s more a journey, straying and meandering along a curious and winding path. Sometimes I start with an idea, sometimes I start with an object or artifact…sometimes the starting point is just a doodle, other times it’s a fully formed vision of the piece.
The bottom line is that I just love making things…objects, artifacts and jewellery. I enjoy the stories they hold and the stories they can tell, the stories they evoke and the stories they conceal.
September 2023
