Susan Lyman: The Cadence of Uncertainty

Please join us for an Artist Talk & Gallery Walkthrough on Saturday, May 10 at 2pm. Included with Museum admission ($15, free for members).

This exhibition includes sculpture and painting created in the past decade by the artist Susan Lyman.

Marked by familiar elements of the natural world–tree limbs and roots, ponds, climbing vines–Lyman’s work investigates the connection between humans and the landscape.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My engagement with trees started over 40 years ago, after arriving as a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, while walking on the outer reaches of Cape Cod – on the backshore, in the woods, and around fresh water ponds.  Occasionally, with permission, I cut invasive thick masses of spiraling bittersweet vine— otherwise by chance, I scavenged fallen limbs and saplings and their upturned roots, then washashore wood coughed up in nor’easter storms or partially burnt from a beach fire, then tree parts discarded at local tree dumps to make room for the next Cape McMansion. I cast my eyes about while traveling and walking elsewhere, in the Pacific northwest, and on the shores of Lake Michigan, scavenging whatever the land or body of water no longer held, in search of material I could use that still had strength and integrity, well before it had decayed to become soil again.  

I sought out forms that twisted and bulged — and if I got lucky, forms that often struck me as funny, or mimicking our own bodies, our imperfections and frailties.  I coerced the disparate wood parts into provocative new “bodies”, sometimes in pairs, adding color, a new “skin”, a head, an arm, perhaps a lone leg and a foot. 

Drawing and painting had became a part of my art practice while in the company and friendship of painters during my fellowship year at the Fine Arts Work Center. Initially these were images of possible sculptures or installations using vine, root and limb. Eventually the paintings became a parallel practice, focusing on my penchant for nature’s oddities (e.g. strange fruits and vegetables), suggesting a surreal hybrid of still life and landscape. In 2012, I began experimenting with collage based on found images and photographs of my sculpture, landscapes and other unusual natural forms. These collages became precursors to new paintings whose unlikely co-inhabitants and natural forms were the stuff of my sculpture. 

This exhibition includes selections of sculpture and paintings from the recent period of  2013-2024, heavily weighted with work completed during and after the Covid lockdown. For some time, my sculpture and painting have not mirrored each other, nor has one practice necessarily preceded the other. More recently however, the two practices have both been engaging the collective experience and impact of Covid, the urgent themes of accelerating climate change, climate migration due to flooding, drought, and fire; in sum, human’s relentless degradation of the landscape. 

Wood is a marker of time, demonstrated through its growth rings, weathering, brokenness and far-reaching roots. Wood and trees reveal these distressing stories to us and can act as harbingers to an alarmingly perilous future.

– Susan Lyman, 2024

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Susan Lyman “washed ashore” in Provincetown MA in 1981 as a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center.  She is a sculptor and painter who now divides her time between Provincetown, Tucson AZ and northern Michigan. From 2012 to 2022 she was a member of Boston Sculptors Gallery, where she was featured in 5 solo exhibits, most recently “Harbinger”, in November 2021. 

In late 2020, Lyman joined a community art project conceived by artist Elizabeth Awalt to commemorate American lives lost to Covid. Artists were invited to make at east 1000 marks on any surface in an attempt to collectively count those lives lost. The exhibition “Remembering Together: Marking Lives Covid 19” was presented in 2021 at The Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard.

In summer 2022, Lyman was awarded a grant to build a site-specific installation, “Songs of Silence v.2” on the campus of the Truro Center of the Arts at Castle Hill in Truro MA, in commemoration of the Center’s 50^th Anniversary. 

Recent exhibitions in 2024 include “Bird Stories: Human Narratives” at Concord Center for the Arts, an installation “Cone of Uncertainty” in Late Wood at Farm Projects in Wellfleet MA. Lyman will present a solo exhibition in 2025, “Postcards from the Border”, at Tohono Chul Galleries, Tucson AZ. 

Lyman has exhibited her work in galleries and museums for over 45 years throughout the United States, as well as in Japan and New Zealand. Her work is held in private, corporate and public collections including Cell Signaling Technology, Saks Fifth Avenue, Champion International Paper, Arkansas Art Center and Museum, Nelson Fine Art Museum and Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Lyman is also the recipient of awards and fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Artists Foundation, Inc., Boston MA.