Susan Te Kahurangi King, born 1951 in Te Aroha, New Zealand, is the second eldest in a family of twelve children. Although chatty as a two year old, at the age of five, her ability to speak was in decline and by the time she reached seven, was a thing of the past.
As King’s inability to speak set in, so too did her heightened ability and commitment to draw. King’s grandmother acknowledged and encouraged the four year old’s artistic talent and at the age of five, soon after starting school, her teacher reported that Susan displayed remarkable mental activity in the creation of complicated figures drawn on paper, and that she was able to concentrate on drawing for hours at a time. At the tender age of seven, King was prolific and showed signs of talent as a young artist.
In 1960, the family moved to Auckland so Susan could attend a newly established special school, which she attended for almost three decades. At some stage in the very early 1990s, King ceased her drawing practice. However, in 2008, fueled by renewed interest shown in her work, not long before the filming of “Pictures of Susan” (directed by Dan Salmon of Octopus Pictures Ltd, 2012), she picked up the pencil and began to draw, continuing where she had left off almost two decades prior.
Less than a year after King recommenced drawing, she had her first ever solo exhibition at Callan Park, Sydney, curated by Peter Faye. King’s exhibition history is extensive with representation in major art fairs, galleries and museums by prominent curators. She has featured in many exhibitions, events and publications in a range of contexts, both as an ‘Outside Artist’ and a ‘Contemporary Artist’. These include; The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, American Folk Art Museum New York, Intuit Chicago, Marlborough Gallery London, The Approach Gallery London, Andrew Edlin Gallery New York, Outsider Art Fairs in New York and Paris with Chris Byrne, Robert Heald Gallery Wellington, City Gallery Wellington, TSB Wallace Arts Centre Auckland and the Auckland Art Fair 2018.
Susan Te Kahurangi King has works in a number of national and international collections including, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, The American Folk Art Museum New York, the Chartwell Collection (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki) and the Wallace Arts Trust, New Zealand.
Susan Te Kahurangi King lives with family in Hamilton and continues her practice as a contemporary artist.
Interview
Silent witness: the outsider art of Susan Te Kahurangi King
by Paula Cocozza for The Guardian 2/22/2018
She stopped speaking aged four, and has since communicated only through her acutely detailed drawings. As her first UK exhibition opens, her sister and curator reveal an extraordinary life – and talent.
Upstairs at the Marlborough Contemporary, a woman bows over a pad of headed notepaper. She doesn’t look up when the door opens. She picks a fluorescent highlighter from a heap in her lap and with the broad side of the nib blocks out a quad of blue or green – close, companionable colours. Then she picks up another pen and moves on to a new quad. She fills the page methodically, a thin white rim around each swatch. She doesn’t look up, and she doesn’t stop until the paper is complete.
Susan Te Kahurangi King is 66 and she has been drawing since she was a young child. For decades the marks that streamed out of her pen have been her prime means of expression, because at around the age of four, King stopped speaking. By the age of nine she had stripped her verbal communication down to an occasional word. At 10, her grandparents were discussing a funeral they had been to, and Susan broke her silence to say: “Dead. Dead. Dead.” It is the last thing anyone remembers her saying.
Sometimes as a child, she hummed or sang as she drew. But when the family introduced her to people, where she grew up in Te Aroha, in rural New Zealand, they’d say, “This is Susan, she doesn’t talk, but she does great art.”
King’s family have always appreciated her work. But it is only in the last few years that she has broken into the commercial world with her first exhibitions at the Outsider art fairs in Paris and New York, and at the ICA Miami. Thousands of miles separate where Susan lives with her sister Wendy, her main carer, in Hamilton, New Zealand, and New York or Dallas, where the freelance curator Chris Byrne divides his time. But one day Byrne was chatting with his friend, the artist and illustrator Gary Panter. Panter mentioned King – he’d come across her work on Facebook – and after the two men had said goodbye, Byrne looked her up. It was like viewing a Philip Guston, he says. “There’s an immediacy there. I knew it so quickly. As a draughtsman she is off the charts, as an image-maker too.”
It’s almost like she’s transcribing. Even though her line is very direct and consistent, there’s no in-between steps
Byrne has curated all of King’s shows. Some of the 32 works exhibited at the Marlborough Contemporary gallery, with their tightly segmented shapes, faces and body parts, tessellate like vibrant, jagged jigsaws. More recent works resemble intricate mosaics. Many childhood drawings depict a nightmarish party, peopled by Disney characters, “Fantaman”, and occasionally the Queen. “The vocabulary is expansive, cumulative. Susan doesn’t scale things up. What’s happening is happening,” Byrne says. “It’s almost like she’s transcribing something. Even though her line is very direct and consistent, there’s no in-between steps.”
Louder than words: the drawings of mute artist Susan Te Kahurangi King
King never plans, never uses an eraser. Interestingly, given her silence, there are a lot of open mouths. And a lot of phallic imagery. (Recently the family found, tucked into Susan’s late grandmother’s diary, six detailed sketches they refer to as “the penis drawings”.) “Who knows what she’s seen where?” says her younger sister Petita Cole, who manages the art side of Susan’s life, when I ask her about this. “Mum used to say ‘Look, you know, the hospital people when she was staying in the psychiatric ward, they were doing anything to get a reaction from her.’”
For all the cartoonish smiles, there is something concerning and dark about these works. Among the noise of high-volume colour, there’s a space for gentler pencil strokes, and occasionally a quiet, still figure emerges from the chaos. Sometimes King draws with a white pencil on white paper, or black on black, as if her nib is searching for a privacy on the paper.
King grew up the second child of 12. “Occasionally Dad would have a shower and he’d walk from the shower to his bedroom nude,” says Petita. “So she’s seen Dad and she’s seen the younger boys. As far as the balance of what’s in the drawings, she’s got those and then she’s got all the magnificent birds and insects.”
At five, her teacher raised concerns about her silence, triggering a long and faltering investigation into King’s muteness. Eventually, the family moved to Auckland to be within reach of an IHC school for children with learning disabilities, which King continued to attend long into adulthood. But Petita believes that the school hampered her sister’s creativity. It was a case of, “Come on, you’re grown up now, we’re not doing art!” Instead King spent her days on assembly work, fitting the cardboard bit inside the lid of Nutella jars.
The repetitiveness of her daytimes began to impact on King at home, where she started to display signs of OCD. She would move the tap to get it lined up right. She took to shutting the windows and fixated on loose threads. She would pull and pull, cut, and wind them up with other loose threads. Years later, when Petita saw the works of artist Judith Scott, she thought, “My gosh, these things that Susan had made, we never saw them as a form of art!”. But at the time, Susan’s disquiet troubled her. “They weren’t done with a smile on her face, they were done as part of an anxiety. It was like, I found this thing and now I’ve got to wind it, and now I’ve got to find more, and then I’ve got to wind it.”
We are talking with Susan beside us, but she doesn’t look up; she knows no sign language, never even points. Occasionally, she swings her feet and soon, possibly tired, she leaves the room.
The family kept everything because it was like, ‘If a doctor were to see it, maybe that would help explain things
Susan’s behaviour, her silence, her notable differences, had always perplexed her family. Perhaps because of this, nothing she produced in childhood was thrown away. Her family has been building her archive her whole life – initially at least, in the hope of understanding her better. “Everything was kept because it was like, ‘If a doctor were to see it, maybe that would help explain things’,” Petita says. It is only over the past decade, when Petita took on a job teaching children with autism, that she realised that Susan probably had the condition. She was finally diagnosed in 2015.
Petita, meanwhile, had decided that a proper archive was in order. She began to sort through Susan’s work. “They were just stored at home in boxes and old cases, and rolled up and put in the rafters.” Corners were bent or torn or crimped from the lids of cases. One sibling had made a scrapbook of Susan’s work and folded, trimmed, glued and taped drawings on to the page. “Broken all the rules!” Petita opines. So Petita stacked the drawings according to which size file they could be stored in and “began the cataloguing”.
To give an indication of Susan’s output, Petita now holds at least 20 A4-sized folders in custom-made cabinetry in an archival room at her home in Northcote. Each has 100 pages. And that’s just up to 1992. (After 1992, Susan stopped drawing for 15 years, partly, Petita thinks, owing to the regimentation of life at the IHC school.) There are also A3, A2 and A1 folders for both before the hiatus and after it. You could try to do the maths, but the answer is in the thousands.
It is Byrne, with Petita’s assistance, who selects the works for exhibition; Susan herself has no understanding of the concepts of either ownership or selection, Petita says. Initially the family rule was that the drawings could be shown but not sold, though they have since relented. “Think about it,” Petita told her sisters after seeing Byrne’s careful framing for the Miami exhibition last year. “When the show is over are we going to say, get them out of those frames, send them back here, they belong in the clear files on my shelves?”
By now Susan has finished her highlighter sketch. Petita takes the headed notepad; that one, too, will likely find its way to the archive.
The Joys and Terrors of an Outsider Artist
While Susan Te Kahurangi King has never consciously worked in or against a fine art tradition, her work is surely original.
by Patrick Price for Hyperallergic July 1, 2017
LONDON – “A certain strangeness,” wrote Walter Pater, “is an element in all true works of art.” The hermetic worlds depicted by many so-called outsider artists can be beautiful in their strangeness, but also suffocating, as if governed by a tyrannical logic. Think of the dizzying perspectives of Martin Ramirez, or the obsessive cartography of Adolf Wölfli. They are like medieval illuminations of private religions.
By contrast, the drawings of Susan Te Kahurangi King (b. 1951) feel closer in spirit to Henry Darger or Bill Traylor, two very different artists in whose work a sense of joy has survived the transition to a realm of private symbolism. At its best, her work is buoyant, varied, and, while often sinister, saturated with pleasure. It rewards extended looking. Its vibrant color gives it a wish-fulfilling aura.
King is severely autistic, and has not spoken since the age of 5. She started to draw very early and has continued for much of her life, stopping around the late 1980s and resuming in 2009. Family members have always encouraged her art. Already well known in her local community in Auckland, New Zealand, only recently has the wider world taken notice of her talent. The illustrator Gary Panter made important efforts to showcase her work in the U.S., and Chris Byrne has put together shows at New York’s Andrew Edlin Gallery (2015) and now London’s Marlborough Contemporary. Both shows have focused mainly on drawings from the 1960s and ’70s.
Her scattered, surging compositions often include figures based on Disney and Warner Brothers characters, while many of the drawings at Marlborough feature the Fanta Man, a character from a soft drink advertisement. (Originally a flat, static icon, she brings him to life, portraying him from many angles.) The way in which the paper surface is treated as a flat expanse to be filled in recalls the look of children’s art.
Closer attention reveals a sophisticated ability to manipulate space in original ways. A field of body parts can loom up like a wave, or remind us of a Tiepolo ceiling in which angels are massed at the edges of clouds. The twists and convolutions to which her figures are subjected alter the space around them, denying flatness and creating a dynamic force that energizes the page. Her compositions can be as lush as those of Arshile Gorky, or as subtle as a Jasper Johns. She is always experimenting.
Alex Katz once defined originality as “a combination of being inside your own head and responding to everything outside… it’s the combination of the two that makes something original.” What’s “outside” might be subject matter, one’s medium, artistic precedents, and culture in general. While it’s probably fair to say that King has never consciously worked in or against a fine art tradition, her work is surely original, and looking at it is a refreshing experience. Is she an “outsider artist”? To acknowledge a tradition, even in order to reject it, might be what makes one an “insider.”
And yet we are all, to some extent, insiders if we speak a shared language. And we are also outsiders, not quite at home in the language we inherit. King might be less at home in verbal language than most, and yet her concerns suggest an interest in the world as much as in the possibilities of her medium. For the psychoanalytic writer Marion Milner, art becomes more than therapy when it demonstrates respect for the independent integrity of its symbols, giving us renewed insight into whatever aspect of the world it pictures. The fact that King’s interests and imagery have overlapped with those of her mainstream contemporaries (whose work she had no way of seeing) is fascinating; her works teaches us something about the peculiar appeal of anthropomorphic cartoon animals.
Her treatment of various cartoon ducks is a reminder that all communication originates in the body, in its actions and passions, affects that must be cathected onto objects or surrogates if they are to be tamed and integrated. These figures appear riven by nameless forces, twisted this way and that, gesticulating wildly, dismembered, or literally tied up in knots. There’s implicit wisdom in King’s choice of classic cartoon characters as vehicles for pre-linguistic affect, recognition of something in their structure that speaks to the early experience of omnipotence, of the childish or regressive body.
When Peter Saul or Markus Lüpertz were drawn to Donald Duck (at the same time as King) they were likely responding to similar qualities. But King foregrounds those qualities exceptionally well. Her use of Donald feels less like an obsessive preoccupation than a fruitful engagement. Her confident line draws attention to the way the brim of his cap echoes the Moebius-like convolutions of his beak; in one drawing the beak is a floating object, symmetrical and self-contained – a beak without a duck.
Besides other visual artists, the most compelling connection for me is with a contemporaneous poem by John Ashbery, in which Popeye “heaves bolts of loving thunder / At his own astonished becoming” (“Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” 1927). What is it about cartoons that might have inspired such startling, masochistic imagery?
Gary Panter believes King’s approach is basically observational, that what she draws is a version of what she actually sees. Maybe she sees these things because her perception is unusually free from the utilitarian demands that filter and focus our ordinary experience. If this evokes Dubuffet’s glamorizing of the raw and unfiltered, I would only add that it’s her use of the limiting schema provided by cartoon imagery that has made that overwhelmingly complex inner activity communicable, or perhaps given it enough structure to be seen. Whether it is a question of autonomous visions which she transfers to the page, or of a creative use of symbols similar to an “ordinary” artistic practice, we can only speculate.
During Tate Modern’s 2013 Global Pop symposium much of the discussion concerned the emergence, during the 20th century, of a worldwide “monoculture,” particularly in the visual field. How has the international dissemination of American iconography from the 20th century onwards threatened local particularities and differences? King’s work, coming from the time and place it does, inevitably looks like a commentary on this phenomenon (no less than, say, the early collages of Scottish Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi).
The insights her work provides could be compared to those of Sergei Eisenstein, who traveled to the United States in 1930, where he met Walt Disney. Eisenstein was immensely enthusiastic about Disney’s creations, which he saw as constituting a modern revival of animism with deep roots in mythical thought.
“How much (imaginary!) divine omnipotence there is in all this!” he wrote, “What magic of reconstructing the world according to one’s fantasy and will! … And you see how the drawn magic of a reconstructed world had to arise at the very summit of a society that had completely enslaved nature – namely, America.”
Whatever conflicting energies found expression within the popular visual culture of the 20th century, King has embodied them in her turn, and in the process illuminated them for us.
