Suri Calder

Practice and approach

Suri Calder paints faces that resist becoming a single, comfortable sign of identity. A band of colour, an enlarged outline or a fragment crossing the eyes can interrupt the quick recognition a face usually invites. Her practice is concerned with that interruption and with what a viewer does next. Does the eye search for an expression beneath the added mark, or begin to read the whole wall as an arrangement of shapes and surfaces?

Calder develops a face through several translations, beginning with a simple drawing and changing its proportions before deciding on a setting. She looks carefully at what an outline can carry and what it leaves out. A strong contour may remain legible from across a room, while a small change around an eye can redirect the entire expression. Her notes distinguish a constructed face from a portrait of a particular person. Where a proposed image would draw on an identifiable sitter, discussion of consent and intended use belongs to the project from its first stage, rather than being added after a painting is complete.

Faces in Common examines the public life of these constructed images. The exhibition places interrupted recognition beside the material facts of walls, painted bands and changing viewing distances. It does not suggest that a bright face can stand for a whole community. Instead, it asks how a shared visual space can contain images that remain open to different readings without treating the people who encounter them as an interchangeable audience.

Calder is attentive to the time a passer-by can give an image. Some decisions must work in a brief glance; others become available only when someone stops. She keeps both scales of attention in view and avoids making a hidden detail the sole key to understanding a work. At Ternform, her practice offers a way to examine the habit of recognition itself. Start by naming what you can actually see, then separate that description from what you have assumed about the face. The distinction is small, but it can change the kind of attention an image receives.