Art: Susan Roberts at the Queen Street Gallery, Neath

Jon Gower

‘I grew up without a mother, so I had to guess what being a mother was. That’s been very difficult for me.’ Susan Roberts is taking me around her beautiful, complex show called ‘Unfinished’  in the Queen Street Gallery in Neath, which is full of female forms, versions of beauty, and accounts of motherhood.  A work called ‘I can’t get any smaller’ shows an adult woman in a foetal position.

Two bronzes called ‘Innocence’ and ‘Desire’ suggest women with their necks tilted so far back their heads are looking absolutely skywards.’ ‘They relate to things that I’ve felt,’ explains Roberts. In turn, such emotions are often felt by the viewer. ‘I had a young woman come in after a long day at work and looked at some ink drawings of mine and she said “My god that’s just how I feel now.” I’m tired. I missed seeing my friends, she just spouted like that for about ten minutes and I thought well they work then!’

‘Impossible Balance’ shows a figure bent over into itself. ‘I had a man say that title’s wrong because you can’t get into that position. He was standing there trying to copy it, contorting himself. But it’s called “Impossible Balance.” That was quite funny. I enjoyed that day.’

The sculptor Michelangelo famously found the shape within the stone. Does Susan similarly see the shape within, or is there one she can impose or tease out of it? ‘You feel it. I rock it backwards and forwards in my hands, teasing it out.’

Nature, weather, time, and erosion sometimes create rock shapes that Susan almost can’t improve upon.  That’s certainly true for the works such as ‘Fertile Form,’ ‘Impalpable Wing’ and ‘Separating Form’ which she has made out of the lovely, smooth shapes of alabaster. ‘With sculpture, I tend to use the titles over and over again, especially with alabaster because I’m still looking for whatever it is I’m looking for.’ In the case of ‘As Old as Time’ she seems to have found two women intermeshed, protecting each other, melding as one.

She finds the alabaster in places such as Penarth and Sully, where it simply falls off the cliffs. One piece called ‘Heartstone’ is flesh-coloured, giving the impression of its being a human organ or skin. ‘When you touch them they become you,’ says Susan. ‘Most people who come into the gallery want to touch the work. I do allow them to if they ask.’

So are the works themselves works of art, or are they found objects? ‘They are pieces of art because I’ve interfered with them,’ explains Roberts. She scored a line down one alabaster chunk and also turned it around and around until she’d found a position she liked it in. In the case of ‘Impalpable Wing’ she kept one side smooth and the other rough, so that one most resembles the muscular upper wing of, say, a swan while the other side examines its featheriness. ‘Fertile Form,’ which has an obvious  pregnant bulge to it, was a different kind of interference, as Sue rounded and polished the original alabaster piece she had found on the beach.

The gallery owner of the Queen Street Gallery is Bethan Ash, who opened it six years ago. ‘I’d lived in Cardiff for over forty years and worked at the Albany gallery. Neath is my home town and when my husband became ill in 2012 we moved back. After he passed away I came down to the town one day and thought there’s nowhere for local artists to show their work. So I looked around and I found reasonably priced premises and opened a gallery. I moved to bigger premises two years later.’

One space led to another as Bethan Ash explains: ‘Then we opened Studio 40, at number forty Queen Street, with artists’ studios above, so we had two places and then last year an old pub on the corner called The Canterbury had been renovated and they held an art fair there and then we took out a lease on the space. The landlord is wonderful, he’s very open to the arts and when I said I was going to have to hire stands for the art fair he said don’t do that, I’ll make them for you. So he made these lovely little niches so the gallery’s slightly split up and makes it more interesting as a space. We’ve had a lovely reaction from the public. It looks like a London gallery in a market town. And Sue Roberts’ work is so powerful. It’s perfect for the space.’

Roberts works in many media – big works sometimes made using house paints that are lying around, works in ceramic, cast iron, bronze – which is a very expensive medium – or ink drawings made using teabags as a brush. The show gathers work from over two decades of artistic productivity and, in that sense, it’s a retrospective show with influences from many places. ‘White Bird’ relates to a bird goddess in eastern Romania while another came from watching a bird in her garden in Tongwynlais, north of Cardiff and ‘seeing what’s pleasing and what relates to you and what doesn’t.’

Some of the works are very substantial. ‘I stand on a lot of chairs. I didn’t like working on a small scale, none of it was expressing what I wanted. The cast iron works, for instance, are just for the experiment, for the joy of them. Sometimes I look at drawings and think did I do that but they all end up being about the same thing. It gives you a tremendous sense of pride when somebody else feels like you do because of the art.’

‘Unfinished’ runs at the Queen Street Gallery in Neath until September 28.