#39 Susan Fereday

"Sally (I Am Lost to Myself)"

Susan Fereday was born in Adelaide, South Austrailia in 1959. She is an Austrailian artist, writer, curator, and educator who lives and works in Austrailia and Germany. Susan Fereday uses a mixed of medias including digital and analogue photography, installation, video, light and shadow. The work that she is best know for is her "post-photographic" installations in which simple materials such as paper mache spheres, glass bowls and goblets along with light and shadow are used to invoke the logic of photography without the use of traditional photographic means. Susan Fereday also exhibits found photographs such as her series entitled "under a steel sky", which include her amatuer photos from the 1950s. It is said that this series resembles Robert Frank's series called "The Americans". Originally Susan went to school to study as a photographic technician in Adelaide before deciding to change directions and study photographic art at Prahran College of Advanced Education in Melbourne where she completed a Bachelor of Arts in 1986. In 1992 she completed her Masters of Arts by research also at Prahran College of Advanced Education. In 1995 after having completed her Masters degree Susan won a Samstag scholarship with which she used to undertake research in Paris in 1996 and then again in 1997. In 2010 she completed a doctorate at Monash University. Susan Fereday has had many solo exhibitions all across Austrailia during the past two decades, some of them being Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide; Artspace, Sydney; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane just to name a few. Fereday has been a teacher in art theory and studio practice at Victoria College of the Arts, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and Monash University.


Susan Fereday is not only known as an artist she is also a writer. She has written catalogue essays, reviews and articles for Australian art magazines such as "Agenda, Photofile, and Eyeline". Susan Fereday also does research which is mostly focused on the theories of photography. Her doctoral thesis was called "Light Out of the Darkness: the origin of photography in mystery and melancholy" which explored meanings in the early photographs of Nicephore Niepce and William Henry Fox Talbot.

http://susanfereday.net/index.html