Bloodletting | Susannah Hoffmann-Mitscherling

“My recent work (above) has been an exploration of memory, nostalgia, the idea of home and connection to land, and my partner’s heroin addiction and subsequent recovery. His recovery has been a process both of celebration and of mourning and, in many ways, one of isolation. My work has been filtered through this lens: not so much a focus on trauma and grief themselves but a reflection on how bodies embody the “with” and the “after” of grief, the body as a site of internalized story, and the physical (land) spaces in which those processes occur. The title of this collection of work as shown here for The Show 2020, ‘bloodletting’, references the belief that emptying contaminated blood from the body can cure illness. Here, Bloodletting is a welcoming of the new and a recognition of the traumatic past as formative along with the formative’s relationship to land – not to land itself, but rather to land’s relation to experience: what I or we have lived in a certain place is in large part shaped by the place itself.”

Susannah Hoffmann-Mitscherling is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Victoria, British Columbia, with a degree from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (BFA major Visual Arts, minor Curatorial Practice).

Having begun a degree in psychology before pursuing a BFA, her work largely centres around portraiture, with a dedicated focus on repetition and series works. Subjects include the complexity of human relationships, consideration of bodies within landscape and story and in relation to the idea of “home” as identity-shaping, as well as a consistent re-visitation of memory along with its ties to nostalgia and grief.

Materials used include acrylic, ink, water and graphite on unstretched canvas, with a separate practice in functional ceramics.