Susanna Koetter
Bio: Susanna Koetter was born in 1991 in Boston, Massachusetts, and has spent the entirety of her life along the coast above the Long Island Sound. In 2013, they received a BA in painting from Yale University, and attended the Yale/ Norfolk School of Art in the Summer of 2012. Prior to Columbia, Susanna lived in Providence, RI, where they worked as an educator and a cook. The pursuit of their work is rooted firmly in print's capacity to tell time. She is interested in how print can indicate “before” and “after” the event of its own making, and how the work can reveal passage in and of itself.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
Two poems by two men, both named Robert:
The Pasture
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young, It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too.
— Robert Frost (1915)
Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
as if it were a scene madeup by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.
She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded.
It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going down whose secret we see in a children’s game of ring a round of roses told.
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos, that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.
— Robert Duncan (1960)
Only in the wake of death can figure turn to ground, like the shifting yin and yang — is this what they mean by changing states?
To my father, whose rest forms the field of my vision:
Everything is for you.