Susan Derges: Many Moons

Susan Derges: Many Moons is showing across all eight spaces at Hestercombe Gallery from the 22nd July to the 22nd October, 2023.


The show thoughtfully reflects on thirty years of printmaking, whilst also drawing on objects and artworks from Hestercombe’s own collections, as well as through the words of two contemporary poets, Fiona Benson and John Wedgwood Clarke.

Susan Derges’s artistic practice has involved cameraless, lens-based, digital and reinvented photographic processes, encompassing subject matter that is mainly informed by cycles of life in the natural world. Much of the work in this exhibition has been made in the landscapes of the North and South Devon coasts and Dartmoor, where Susan Derges has her studio and darkroom hut.

Susan Derges’s approach to image making has been an attempt to understand the whole by allowing the minutiae to imprint themselves into the various photographic processes she has worked with. Earlier prints like the River Taw, the Streens and Shorelines involved immersing photographic paper directly into bodies of water at night in order to record the traces of movement and forces defining a place; More recent work like the Many Moons and Many Lives or Seed Constellation prints have involved growing and nurturing a subject as it develops over time. Sometimes quite elaborate studio set ups are involved, as in the making of the Tide Pool prints where a large glass tank filled with moving saline water was suspended above the camera in her studio in order to experience the life of a rockpool from within rather than by photographing it from above. Whether working outside at night, or in the studio with more staged events, there has always been a performative element to the making that reaches an audience only once the work has come into existence.

There is opportunity to purchase three new poetry books, printed specifically for the exhibition via the Gallery Shop.

Dates & Tickets

Susan Derges: Many Moons is showing at Hestercombe Gallery from 22nd July 2023 until 22nd October 2023.

Entry is by gardens admission only.

Hestercombe Gallery is open daily from 11am - 5pm.

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