VISUAL ART - ISSUE FIVE
Fathomless Depths of Imagination
SUSAN TE KAHURANGI KING
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Untitled, late 1960s - early 1970s, Graphite and colored pencil on back of 1961 PAN AM calendar, 287 x 210 mm
usan was born to parents Doug and Dawn King in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951. She was a bright child and developed normally. At the age of four, she began to gradually stop speaking. This process took place over a number of years, and she has not spoken since. Despite many visits to doctors and specialists, Susan has never been formally diagnosed with any specific condition. A couple of Susan’s sisters, having had first hand experience with autistic kids, believe she has a form of autism.
Susan started to draw very seriously from an early age. She was heavily influenced by comics and animation, and has always been interested in the construction of things and all aspects of the natural world. The formation of rocks, the construction of buildings and bridges, the anatomy of a duck, the fronds on a fern - everything is absorbed. Susan’s drawings were generally kept, and the archive spans six decades.
As well as showing fathomless depths of imagination, the technical complexities in Susan’s drawings reveal an engineering brain at work.
-Rachel King
Untitled, late 1960s – early 1970s, graphite and coloured
pencil on found paper, 120 x 140 mm
Untitled, mid 1960s, graphite on card (back of scrapbook cover), 132 x 205 mm
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Untitled, late 1960s – Early 1970s, graphite on coloured paper, 328 x 205 mm
Untitled, late 1960s – early 1970s, graphite on coloured paper, 328 x 205 mm
Untitled, 1960s, graphite and coloured pencil on paper, 206 x 175 mm
Untitled, late 1960s – early 1970s, graphite on back of
printed document, 185 x 105 mm
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Untitled, 1967 - 1970, copy pencil on irregular shaped Cranwells document, 270 x 150 mm
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Untitled, 1960s, graphite on paper, 206 x 164 mm
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Untitled, c. 1958 – 1961, crayon on paper, 125 x 202 mm
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Untitled, 1966, graphite and coloured pencil on buff colored paper, 197 x 273 mm
Untitled, 1970s, graphite on newsprint paper, 70 x 210 mm
Untitled, late 1960s – early 1970s, graphite, pastel, and coloured pencil on paper, 258 x 206 mm
Untitled, 1975 - 1985, Graphite on the back of MILO packaging, 272 x 132 mm
Susan Te Kahurangi King was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951. She lives and works in Auckland.
