Susan Norrie

(born 1953)

Be seeing you (Do not forsake me oh my darling) 2006

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The collection of the artist
Mori Gallery, Sydney
The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired in 2006


For Susan Norrie and many others born in the 1950s, the cult television show The Prisoner was a formative experience. Broadcast in 1967-68, it starred Irish actor Patrick McGoohan as a secret service agent who had fallen foul of his superiors due to his abrupt resignation. He was gassed and transported to a strange village, where he was to be interrogated and re-programmed. In The Village he became Number 6. Any attempt to escape led to pursuit and inevitable capture by a large white balloon - which is the single image by which most people remember the series. The show mystified contemporary critics, but became a cult favourite with young people, Norrie included, for its surreal portrait of an arch individualist struggling to escape a domineering and oppressive society. Along with books like One flew over the cuckoo's nest it contributed to the development of the counter-culture.

In 2004 Susan Norrie released her video Enola, based on a model village in Japan. Norrie had a long-standing interest in model villages, and after Enola she turned to Portmeirion, a model village in Wales. As Norrie knew, Portmeirion was the main location for The Prisoner. Designed and built by the architect Clough Williams-Ellis between 1925-75, it was loosely based on Portofino in Italy and combined many architectural styles – so much so that it is often cited as an inspiration for post-modernism. A note of surrealism is added by the fact that the scale of all buildings is just over half life size.

Norrie's interest in Portmeirion led to her decision to revisit The Prisoner. But rather than video, she decided on a series of paintings. She found a photo of Portmeirion in a tourist brochure – a bland, day-lit exterior about 4 cm square – and this single image became the basis for the series. The image was transferred to a silk-screen just under 160 cm square. For each painting a background layer of paint was applied, often in more than one colour. The screen was then placed over the top and painted in black to create an image of the village. Norrie then worked into the image, highlighting some areas and obscuring others.

She called the series Be seeing you, which was the taunting farewell line used by Number 6's interrogators - referring to the level of surveillance in The Village and the fact that there was no privacy, let alone escape. Each painting was named after one of the episodes.

In the flesh, the paintings have a strong physical presence. Sombre images, all set at night, they speak of decaying ideals, mutability and mortality. Portmeirion was quite spooky in The Prisoner, but at least it was seen in daylight. And the message of the show itself was positive, affirming that an individual could triumph over the powers of the state. Norrie's Portmeirion however comes from the deep subconscious, like a memory flash, with the seeping colours suggesting that whatever positive message the show once had, and our youthful idealism with it, has long gone.

Do not forsake me oh my darling was episode 13 of The Prisone, and is the thirteenth painting in the first series of Be seeing you. It belongs to a small group in which the artist reduced the range of colours to an almost monochrome black and white, and is among the most delicate and beautiful paintings in the series.

John Cruthers