Suzanne Holtom

In Conversation: Suzanne Holtom with Anna Souter

Suzanne Holtom’s expansive paintings explore the heavy art historical weight of the landscape tradition, while also expressing a nuanced environmental sensibility specific to the West Midlands landscapes of her childhood. Her collection of work for And Hills Bore Scars draws on multifaceted geological, ancient, and (post-)industrial histories to populate prismatic paintings that crackle with unseen signals, constituting a poetic open-ended mapping of the wealth of information and ideas archived in the contours of these little-painted landscapes.

Anna Souter: Perhaps we could start by talking about your process and your use of materials?

Suzanne Holtom: My process is very physical, and it is simultaneously both improvised and structured. The surfaces are really important, as is the materiality of the canvas. I start by unthreading the weave from the back of the canvas. These threads become my structural drawing materials; I drop them horizontally on top of the canvas and that is where all my painterly surfaces emerge from.  

AS: Is that a process of chance, where you just drop them and see where they land, or are you quite deliberate about how you do that?

SH: It's a bit of both. I have sort of ‘line memories’ in my head from making lots of drawings both on site and in the studio, and I surround myself with those drawings while I’m painting. Because I’m standing above the canvas and dropping the threads, they have their own way of falling, but if I think it’s not right, I will pick it up and drop it again. So it’s a combination of knowing chance and structural improvisation. I enjoy the entanglement of the threads as they fall, and I want that language to come through.

AS: It’s interesting how you get a bird's eye view from standing over the flat canvas. It makes me think of how you take inspiration from the Weltlandschaft or “world landscape”, a school of Flemish landscape painting from the 16th century, which takes a similar bird’s perspective on imaginary compilations of geographical features. It’s an art historical development that still informs how we feel about landscape as a concept and as both a medium and a format in painting.

In the Weltlandschaft, for the first time, what was previously considered the background became the subject of the painting, blurring those lines between subject and object and background and foreground. Those painters challenged audiences to question where we place our emphasis and interest in a scene – and therefore in an environment or an ecosystem perhaps.

SH: Absolutely. And those sort of spatial relations between surface and space are really important to me. The Flemish landscapes are part recorded observation and part imagined improvisation.  

There's also a topographical element that I really like, particularly with Bruegel being so influenced by map making. There are a few links with mapping in my work, especially as the paintings develop. After dropping the threads, I put broad, thin territories of colour down. I then make these gestural areas more defined by retracing linear shapes on top. This act of retracing means the work doesn’t solely rely on gesture, but the gestural and improvisatory forms attract new layers of meaning through a build-up of contours.

AS: Landscape is a format that comes with a huge art historical and sociocultural heft. For instance, there is an English tradition that runs back to Gainsborough, in which landscape painting was developed as a means of marking territory and proclaiming land ownership, particularly in the wake of the enclosures and the deprivation of traditional shared land rights.

It seems like your practice picks a way through the inevitable politicisation of land that comes with thinking about mapping. When we look at a landscape – and particularly when we look at a representation of a landscape – there are always key questions at stake: whose point of view is it, who does the land belong to, how is it accessed?

I think your work goes some way towards breaking down the hierarchies inherent in those questions by employing a huge range of references, from geology to poetry to popular culture. And these are almost materially integrated into the work through your very physical and layered process. This reminds me of how the Weltlandschaft paintings are composite landscapes, offering a kaleidoscopic or prismatic perspective on the picture plane.

SH: In the Weltlandschaft, there’s a shifting viewpoint because you know it doesn’t make perfect logical sense. I think my paintings similarly don’t make sense from one particular viewpoint; they’re visually kaleidoscopic, as you say. In a similar way, in making my work, I bring together disparate references and gently hold them in my mind while I paint. Everything comes to a sort of synthesis in the work.

But my overall question is: how do I make a landscape painting that’s meaningful for me? There’s such a huge history behind it and there are so many potential pitfalls around sentimentalising nature, so I want to be aware of that enormously broad context and to negotiate my way around the potentials held within landscape painting. But at the same time, I also want to be specific. I’m talking about a very specific bit of earth.

My paintings draw on particular sites, such as Barr Beacon, Wren's Nest in Dudley, and Streetly where I grew up. Located in the uncertain spaces between towns and cities, these spaces have been indelibly marked by people and our technological and industrial developments. Throughout my paintings, I take certain local motifs such as quarries and pylons, and try to give them a mythical status.

AS: I’m really drawn to that idea of mythologizing post-industrial features, which were designed to do something specific and functional, but which have been transformed into something else by the passage of time and by technological, economic, and sociocultural developments. Interventions such as pylons have gained new significances as they have become part of their environments. They’ve become way-markers and orientation points, as well as objects of childhood fascination and fear (as you allude to in your references to 1970s government films warning about the dangers of electricity). In some ways, pylons stand isolated from their surroundings, alien and aloof. But in other ways, they have become an integral part of these landscapes, and particularly an integral part of how local people experience their environment.

SH: I hint at pylons in my paintings through the thread work. They’re not explicit, but inferred through the structures of the thread, which sometimes resolve into an image and then fall out of image again. I try to keep these elements in tension.

 I've always seen the pylons as sort of silent sentinels, but also as signallers, as communication systems that spread across the landscape. People have mixed feelings about them; I have made several paintings in relation to Barr Beacon, where there was a strong objection to the pylons being erected. But there's a kind of a beauty and an elegance to these structures as well. They have a mystery that speaks to Romanticism, which ties into my interest in the radical Romantic idea of giving a status or an emotional quality to a landscape.

AS: You work on a large scale in your paintings; the largest in the show are 220 x 180cm. Does this tie in with your interest in Romanticism and the sublime?

SH: Yes, I try to bring an unexpectedly large scale to these places. I think there is an epic history there. The West Midlands isn’t known as an epic place, but I think it is in terms of its myriad histories and landscapes. I'm also alluding to childhood and memories, and that sense of being smaller in the world and looking out onto these spaces, which felt far more monumental to me in my childhood. I’m interested in trying to connect very deeply with a sense of place, which could happen in a lot of different ways.

AS: It’s fascinating to think about how the Industrial Revolution was (literally) fuelled on an international scale by events that happened millions of years ago – and those events happened on both a microscopic and planetary scale. Over millennia, tiny lifeforms lived and died until they built up sediments of coal or limestone which have forged the fates of our planet time and again. And then again, those deposits have created the specificities of local landscapes and directed the course of industrial development in the Black Country in unique ways, which are still felt in geographical, sociocultural, and economic contexts today. It’s almost dizzying. I like the idea of marking those places where geology, human activity, and non-human nature have interacted in very specific ways.

SH: The Black Country was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution because of what was underneath the surface of the earth here. A lot of these sites have very specific geological fingerprints, which are intertwined with ancient history, archaeology, and industrial history. Wren’s Nest, for instance, is an important site for fossils, but that limestone was also used to make all kinds of products during the Industrial Revolution. The sites that I’ve worked with are quite spectacular, but on a modest scale. And today these sites of human intervention have in large part been reclaimed by wildlife, but they still bear the signs of human activity.

Some of these places are still instantly recognisable in the writings of Anna Seward, a local Romantic poet who was known as the Swan of Lichfield in the 18th century. One of the first environmental poets, she writes about the land being ravaged during the Industrial Revolution through extractivism. She talks about the land as being defiled as if it is a body, which spoke to me because I always think about paintings in terms of flesh and bodies. 

AS: I think that connects to the exhibition’s title And Hills Bore Scars (also the title of one of your largest paintings), which comes from a line by another Black Country poet, Liz Berry. I would be tempted to see the texture of your work, and those threads and linear forms, as a form of scarring – a process which speaks of violence but also of healing.

SH: I definitely relate to that. The threads have got quite a bite to them; I often emphasise them by painting a shadow beneath them, so they can look quite severe. In some places they appear to form images and in others they look like a cut going across the canvas. Leonardo da Vinci’s worldview was that the body is intimately connected to the land, and one can be seen as a microcosm of the other; veins are to bones as rivers are to rocks. I have that in mind when I’m working on my paintings.