Betty Susiarjo

Graceful Verticality (2023–Ongoing)

washi sticker on paper

27.5 cm x 21cm (each)

The collection is an ongoing work and it began as a coping mechanism that I employed, while passing through the reality and illusion of war. It is also during this time that news and images exposed in social media began to confuse, complicate and cloud the situation. So I view these daily entries like a practice of coming closer to some sort of truth. I think the repetitive element and the employment of craft in my work are not new, they are often seen in my previous work.

But I love to contemplate on the use of dots here as they bring up initially simple visual encounter, but then starts to become complex as you carry on making the works. They remind me of the use of dots in Pointillism and how images were created almost still and real as photographs, yet they heavily carry its fictional and dream-like quality. They also remind me of pixelated/ computed generated pictures where they are perfectly composed, yet easily break down when there is a technical glitch or error. It makes me ponder that perhaps sometimes, something that is visible may not be real at all and vice versa, something which is less seen or even unseen, maybe more authentic.

Betty Susiarjo (b. Indonesia) is a mixed media artist whose work engages concept of temporality, materiality and sublimity. She received her MA (Fine Arts) with Distinction from Winchester School of Art, England and her BA (Fine Arts) from Surrey Institute of Arts and Design, England. She also graduated with a Postgraduate Certificate in Art and Design Education from Goldsmith College, University of London, England. 

Influenced by the studies of and the relationships between physics and metaphysics, her work seeks for an awareness of a moment presented in a particular time and space, thus seeking to provide a poetic realm for contemplation. Her work has been seen in the international scene, such as in 2016, at Motions, a multi-media exhibition in OTA Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan. In 2017, she is a participating artist at Changing Perspectives in ARTJOG10, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In 2019, she was part of the artists exhibiting in Personal Structures: Identities, hosted by the European Cultural Centre, in the context