The dark in the light -
a potentiality

Susie Pascoe

2 - 28 June 2026 | Community Gallery

Exhibition Opening Event:  Sunday 7 June at 1pm

‘So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing…’

T S Eliot

‘when we [fearlessly] look at it…[our ecological despair] turns to reveal it’s other face, and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.’

Joanna Macy ( American eco-philosopher, environmental activist, scholar of buddhism)

This exhibition represents work created over an eleven year period. I have taken tentative steps in an experiment with textiles in order to try and find my own creative ‘voice’. A process that, in many ways, I am still at the beginning of.

Last year I was honoured to hang some of my more contemporary work alongside Pip Steel’s beautiful collection of Boro. That exhibition allowed me to directly acknowledge and pay homage to the ways in which Boro has played a role, not only in its genesis but, to some extent, its development, and material practice.

My work is also an exploration - a metaphysical search in the dark - of what can be revealed and what is hidden. To me there is something deeply, powerfully, feminine contained within darkness which resonates. Whilst my work explores my personal ecological grief regarding the devastating impacts and environmental losses extractive capitalism has wrought on our Mother Earth, the dark can also be seen as a place to find stillness and solace from that grief and loss and, importantly, a place that reveals light.

For me, within the creative process itself, there is some sort of indefinable link to the potentiality that the states of dark and light hold. This sense of potentiality provides an impetus to continue developing my work. I am curious about the ways in which this exploration provides me with some sense of joy and hope for this astoundingly beautiful, thinning and threadbare world.

Susie Pascoe

Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.