Exhibition Dates: 7 December - 17 January 2024

26 Oxford Street | Woollahra, NSW, 2025

The artworks of Dr. Suzanne Moss explore sensual and conversational possibilities of colour and light through the language of geometric abstraction. Since the outset of her doctorate in 2006, Dr. Moss has explored how abstract methods might evoke aspects of human experience, such as the feeling of being welcome and belonging.

The Vanessa Series, from which her latest exhibition is drawn, was informed by the art and design practice of British modernist Vanessa Bell. Commenced in 2022 and completed in 2024, the title - Vanessa Goes Home to Paint - refers to Bell’s resolute freedom; the significance of her home Charleston and how she lived with steadfast commitment to her practice.

Moss walked in Bell’s footsteps at Charleston, and those of her sister Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House, curious about the intersection of how a special place feels and the perceptual effects of colours, shapes, light and space.

 Long intrigued by how light articulates, and can seem to alchemise the ambience of interior spaces; shifting colours with changes in time of day, season, weather and one’s movement, Moss’s paintings also change with the light.

Bearing in mind humans have used diagrams to order, hold and communicate powerful information for millennia, Moss asks might it be possible to hold my discoveries in painterly diagrams? She intends to sustain the beholder with conversations in colour, homely decorative elements, and places to stop and rest.

Dr. Moss extended her practice to include ceramics so she could make spaces to stop and hear oneself think. In effect, they affirm the need for a room of one’s own, as Bell’s sister so famously wrote about.

Created in the Snowy Valley, multiple layers of acrylic gouache on Belgian Linen make up the Vanessa paintings. Each work undergoes compositional transformation from inception to completion over many weeks, until the conversation in colour and light are just right.