Season's Greeting Card 1944

Curator: This is Sue Fuller's "Season's Greeting Card" from 1944, a fascinating little print. I'm especially drawn to the artist’s exploration of abstraction and the linear quality. Editor: It's surprisingly disquieting for a greeting card! Those jagged geometric shapes and intense line work create this tense, almost unsettling feeling. What exactly is it meant to be "greeting" us with? Curator: Well, if you examine the historical context of the artwork, we can see it was created during the final years of the Second World War. It is clear, with an artistic piece crafted via the etching medium, she aimed to explore abstraction, geometric figures and bold use of lines within the limitations of a printable format. This card might be her way of using art for conveying the complex emotional landscape of that time, a meditation of it for an art piece. Editor: Ah, yes. Now the line work starts to look less like random abstraction and more like shards of something broken and reformed. It’s less about holiday cheer and more like… endurance? It's beautiful, but not exactly festive! It feels more personal now. Almost like a peek into her internal state, made during this specific era in our world’s history. Curator: And let's consider how Fuller utilizes the printmaking process itself. The very nature of etching – the deliberate scoring, the acid bath, the repetitive printing – all reflect the labor and industrial processes prevalent at the time. Each stage is deliberate, but there's also an element of chance involved, a subtle collaboration between the artist and the materials. Editor: That's a lovely point about the 'chance collaboration'. There's something intimate about an etching. It isn't just a painting or a drawing; there’s the printing element where she hands over agency to the tool of dissemination, transforming something solitary into multiple messages. I almost see a complex Rorschach blot reflecting both her personal world, but inviting anyone that sees it to consider themselves in it too. Curator: Ultimately, what I find captivating is how Sue Fuller navigates those boundaries in the creative process with what seems to be this intimate conversation she's holding between these geometric figures through their lineworks. She offers an intimate and challenging aesthetic that deviates from what holiday greetings stood for in those years, making us reconsider our ideas around what the meaning of greetings even stands for. Editor: Yes, a complex message conveyed through seemingly simple materials. It lingers, doesn't it? You almost wonder what kind of holiday card she would send today.