SUZANNE ARCHER ‘FEELING THE BOY’ 1987 IN ‘THE DAILY EXAMINER’: ARTEFACTS

ARTEFACTS: Exploration of childhood

Feeling the Boy, 1987 (Suzanne Archer)
Feeling the Boy, 1987 (Suzanne Archer)

Collection Highlight

Suzanne ARCHER

Feeling the boy 1987

mixed media on paper

67 x 101cm

Winner of the 1987 Jacaranda Art Prize

Jacaranda Art Society Collection

Feeling the boy is the winner of the Jacaranda Art Prize held in 1987. Well-known Australian artist Guy Warren, as judge of the 1987 Jacaranda Art Prize, awarded this expressive work which explores the artist’s experience of her pregnancy. Like her work of this time, Feeling the boy was centred around her personal experiences and was created in series or bodies of works. Linear markings created in graphite, ink, pen and wash, oil pastel and pencil construct images triggered by sound, sensation and smell. The images or marks are part of the artist’s personal visual language and can be seen throughout this series of works that developed from the artist’s initial exploration of her childhood in the early 1980s.

The drawing Feeling the boy towards painting, it is a fusion of medium. This is indicative of the late 1980s when the boundaries between areas of artistic practice were becoming more indistinct. Feeling the boy was part of the Jacaranda Art Society Collection, one of the founding collections of the Grafton Regional Gallery, which was gifted in 1988 with the establishment of the gallery by the Jacaranda Art Society.

Suzanne Archer was born in Surrey, UK and studied at the Sutton School of Art (1964). She arrived in Australia in 1965 and is based in the Wedderburn region of New South Wales. Archer has exhibited regularly since the late 1960s and is a recipient of the Wynne Prize (1994), the Dobell Prize (2010), the Kedumba Drawing Prize (2010) and the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2018). She has undertaken residencies at Greene Street Studio, New York; Power Studio at Cite Internationale, Paris and Redgate Residency, Beijing. Career surveys have been held at the Macquarie University Art Museum, Sydney (2016) and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Campbelltown (2019). Archer’s work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artbank as well as significant regional and tertiary institutions.