Suze van der Beek - &Gallery Catalogue

Suze van der Beek Scrye

10 May - 8 June 2025

Suze van der Beek

SCRYE

I enjoy thinking about the history of photography, our shared cultural relationship with images, and what photography can do, as an artwork. Over the past ten years, I’ve developed my particular approach to photographic practice by working with a small body of water in front of the camera. A reflective body of water, like the sensor inside a digital camera, is a light-sensitive surface and I appreciate the opportunity this method affords me to think about looking and visual perception. Bodies of reflective water have myriad associations throughout history, the least being a capacity to mesmerise a viewer, hence the title for this show, Scrye.

I also work with the conventions of the landscape tradition, pared back to its fundamental elements; foreground, background and horizon and I maintain these consistent compositional parameters throughout a series of work. This structure becomes, in my mind, as like a room, an empty, bare room, hollow and spacious into which the light arrives. While I am working, I am looking at the world in front of the lens through this scaffolding or framing.

The images are constructed by the apparatus of the camera in relation to a small body of water/ lens and as such they are fictitious, and at the same time they are true to the light front of the lens at the time of capture. These artworks are evidence of light, as something we experience bodily or somatically as well as something we see.

My art practice is an ongoing exploration of relationships, between myself and the world, the world and the resulting photographic image and between the image and the viewer. While I am immersed in the practice, I gently hold an existential question in mind, which is basically the same question, constantly repeated, and while there is never any answer to my ‘scrying’, there is an excellent opportunity to feel the resonance of this question about my relationship to the world.

I appreciate the opportunity to stand in the utter and complete silence of the natural environment to my queries, while experiencing a sharpened sense of the unknowability and otherness of the world amidst its indescribable beauty.

My photographic practice is a method for enacting a phenomenological enquiry. This gathering of artworks, Scrye is both the visual results of this enquiry and evidence of a practice of looking.