Still Life | Susan Rosenberg

Still, Life 1

“Memory isn’t always accurate,” says Susan Rosenberg, at the very start of our conversation about her new exhibition; and it’s an appropriate place to begin, given that her evocative work – which draws on her life – is about what we forget, as well as what we remember. “You might see a face in the crowd, and suddenly you are reminded of someone – but what you remember might be blurred, even if it feels very vivid.”

She has always been interested in how she might visually express those fragments of memory: whether in the ethereally anonymous human figures of her last exhibition, or her latest work, of plants and flowers. As with the figures, these are not flowers that can be named and pinned down, specified or identified. “They come from the recesses of the past,” she says, “from travelling, perhaps, when you glimpse a field from a train, or maybe the flowers that you see at wedding. They get tangled up with previous experiences – flowers at births, or marriages, or deaths – the colours in the threads of memory.”

It’s a recurring theme in her work: “an unravelling and decoding,” as she herself suggests; though what I like about her pictures is that they are never aggressively explicit, allowing one’s own experience to inform them, as if holding up a mirror to the half-imaginary landscape of our pasts. Certainly, looking at these new still lives, I found myself remembering long-ago visits to South Africa, which is where my parents were born, and where Susan spent her childhood. “The light was so different there – it illuminates the past,” she says. “I grew up in Pietermaritzburg, in a house with a large sunny garden, and a profusion of subtropical flowers.” She shows me one of her wonderful pictures in this series, of pink and yellow flowers – characteristically unidentified – but as she herself admits, “these are the expression of a very happy time in South Africa”.

Even so, it is surely no coincidence that her family past is as blurred and fragmented as the memories that are such an integral part of her work. “My father’s father, who was Jewish, was born in north London, in Islington,” she explains, “and his wife, my paternal grandmother, was a Lithuanian Jew. On the other side of the family, my mother’s grandparents came from the Orkneys: though they didn’t actually meet each other until they got to South Africa.”

Her father was an amateur artist, painting in his spare time from a job as town planner, while her mother was a photographer. Susan was the middle child (she has an older brother and younger sister): “and as little kids, our great excitement was to be allowed into my mother’s darkroom. I still get a thrill remembering it – the picture emerging out of the darkness”.

After art school in Pietermaritzburg, Sue made the journey to America, to study as a postgraduate at the University of Wisconsin. “It was extraordinary,” she says. “The snow fell in the first week of September, and didn’t melt until April. I lived in this ground floor apartment, with drifts of snow up against all the windows, so it was like being in a white world, after all the colour of South Africa. I was there for two years, and broke all the time, so I couldn’t afford to go home – but I loved it there.”

After her time in America, she returned to her homeland, and taught at the Johannesburg School of Art. It was there that she met John Lazar, the man who was to become her husband, and when he came to study at Oxford, she followed him, and to London subsequently. “So I’ve been living here for the last 20 years,” she says, almost ruefully, though the grey streets of this city have been interspersed with periods in California and trips to South Africa. “I miss the light of my childhood,” she admits. “Whenever I take that overnight flight back to South Africa, I always try to sit beside a window, and look out for the Southern Cross in the sky – that constellation of stars that you can only see in the Southern Hemisphere. And then after the long-haul flight, I step out of the plane to all that sensual colour and heat, which is so amazing. But, after a few weeks in South Africa, I come back to England with a sigh of relief – I love the sense of order here, which manages to survive even when London feels like a city falling apart and held together with sellotape.”

She describes herself as a Londoner now – indeed, she and John and their two children are long-time inhabitants of a very particular corner of north London (Fortis Green) – but the varied threads of her past seem beautifully braided together in her present life. The light in her paintings spills out of the darkness – just as it must have done so in her mother’s darkroom – and her new house is filled with mementoes of the past: shells and feathers from journeys to South Africa and elsewhere; a chair from her grandfather’s house in Islington, that made the trip to Africa and, years later, back again.

Just as I’m leaving, she shows me one of her oldest pieces of work – a collage of scallop shells, cast in her own handmade paper, that came with her from South Africa. “I was interested in the symbolism of those shells,” she says, “the scallop both broken and whole. St James always carried one with him, and it’s the symbol of pilgrimage.” Twenty years later, Susan Rosenberg is still on a sort of pilgrimage: through the past, as she moves forward, and all the while returning home.