A Kick Up The Arts #13: Susan Brambell

Susan Brambell

’ve been making lists and lining things up all my life, so making lists of words into shapes is an ideal work/life balance for me.

I’ve made all the Irish international rugby players since 2000 into a prop forward and my favourite 100 pubs into a pint glass. Coming up with ideas is the best bit – it takes lots of Baileys and Toblerone. It was during one of those muse & booze-filled nights that I started the Manky Map, a map of Ireland made up of our vernacular sayings.

I’m an English and drama teacher by training – I taught in Newpark for 13 years – and you can see a lot of literature and a love of language in my work. Over a number of years I studied Photoshop and other graphic packages and love all the fiddling around with images and typography.

I’d left teaching to be at home with the kids and when the youngest chap, the one in the picture with me here, started play school in 2013, I started The Word Bird, making customised word art. At this stage I’ve made pictures for every important milestone in people’s lives, from births and christenings, communions, through all the birthdays, engagements, weddings, anniversaries, and one even went to a funeral.

My Work

Above is the map which is so much fun as well as documenting many of our unique vernacular sayings, some quite old now and not so widely used. I’d made it originally as a present for my dad, who is a real Dub, but I had to clean it up a bit when it came to selling it. It’s the single most widely travelled print out of my collection – there are toilet walls in over 30 countries with
one of these.

The Guitar of Irish Bands illustrates well how I enjoy list making and then turning it into a shape. I know every Irish band isn’t in it, but I put in all the more main ones who’ve recorded one
album or more. I print these as they’re ordered so it’s no problem taking a band out to pop in another if someone’s favourite band isn’t there.

The Eiffel Tower here was done as a commission recently as a gift for a couple who’d got engaged there. It turned out really well and was a great shaped building to work with. I use silhouettes
of shapes and put the words in whereever there’s a dark area. With the silhouette form in mind I came up with a range of iconic characters from children’s literature and here’s the one from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Text from the novel fills the silhouetted characters and a silhouetted shadow of a character or symbol appears in one of the corners. I’ve enjoyed these a lot, children’s classic texts are a world you can always go back to and enjoy a root around.

My Influences

Works I always stop in my tracks to peer into would come from the post impressionist, surrealist and hyperrealist movements.
One of the paintings I think I’ve loved longest is George Seurat’s Bathers at Asniéres. I love its gentleness, its relaxed characters, the depiction of the heat haze. He painted this at just 24. I hadn’t taken on board how big it was until I saw it in the National Gallery in London – it’s massive, like ten feet wide or something. I don’t think I would ever get tired of looking at it. During the construction of the Olympic Park in London for the 2012 games, the artist in residence for the park, Neville Gabie, recreated the scene along the bank of the Thames using construction workers, gardeners, security staff and engineers. I love this photograph too for its variety of life and activity all taking a moment out (or hours and hours as was the case) to hold up a modern mirror to a well known 19th century painting.

Surrealism has fascinated me since I was really young too – there’s something in the appearance of melted clocks that seems to appeal to the day dreaming adolescent mind. I love the whimsy of it, the placing of everyday things out of context, and also the visual exploration of existentialism. Dreams, fantasies and fears are all played out on curious landscapes and altered realities. I’ve chosen a René Magritte as an example, it’s his The Happy Donor. The silhouetted figure is such a trademark of his and isn’t sinister or faceless as we know him well now from all his appearances. I love silhouettes – they’re what I work with to fill the words into and the one here is a beauty. It’s possibly Magritte’s view of himself, his self-portrait expressed through his  perception. The picture looking into the picture is very effectively done here with every item in the painting carrying huge symbolism. You could spend a long time discussing what everything represents and why its placement is such and you could also keep changing your views as you re-visited it; that is the wonder of perception and experience. But I’m also often brought back to the cool drawl of a bored teen in one of my poetry classes on Austin Clark – ‘that cow is a cow, Miss – the rest is a whole load of symbollocks’.

Finally, hyperrealism – I was an adult when I first came across a painting from this genre and I just couldn’t get over it.
Unreal. Seriously, you’re looking at it in disbelief that it’s a painting, not a photo. The skill level of these blows my mind, and I really enjoy that a lot of the time the subject matter is everyday things, nothing flash or luxurious as was the norm with the old masters and
their still life works. As an example here are two by Ralph Goings who paints images of contemporary Americana; pick-up trucks, coke cans, diners. You’ve really got to keep reminding yourself that they’re painted. There are always works in a gallery you half jokingly think you could do yourself, others you know you couldn’t do but you have a good idea how they did it, and then there’s this category – the how the hell did they do this? one.

You can find out more about The Word Bird right about here.