Nature's shifting motions become a source of exploration for Suzanne Hill's 'High Water Mark,' an exhibit that took five years to create and culminated in more than 60 pieces. Story by Kate Wallace

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If Suzanne Hill were an author, it is most certainly novels, not essays or poems or even short stories, that she'd write. For Hill, an artist who revels in delving deeply into her subject matter, a single canvas would be like a few thin pages - not nearly room enough to adequately explore an idea.

High Water Mark, her latest series, was a five-year plunge into the subject of the show's title, that familiar seaside feature that Hill describes in her artist statement as "a reminder of advance and retreat, ebb and flow, natural and sometimes unusual chance."

The show of mixed media works is touring the province. It opened in October at the UNB Art Centre at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, before moving to Galerie d'art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen at the Université de Moncton, where it will be exhibited until March 29, and where other works related to the series are included in the exhibition. From April 23 to June 4 it will be on display at Galerie Colline in Edmundston, before wrapping up at Peter Buckland Gallery in Saint John, where it will be exhibited until the end of June.

"If you imagine a room, and you fill it with pertinent stuff ... it's like chapters in a novel. The room becomes your novel," Hill, 65, says Monday afternoon in her sunny studio on the fourth floor of the John Law Building, an old brick edifice in Saint John's uptown that houses numerous artist studios and creative types' offices.

Because of the traditional fine arts training she received at Mount Allison University, where the Montreal native graduated from in 1964, "I've never been able to be ironic," Hill says. "The only thing I can do is think and try to share that."

The show got its start much the same way Hill's earlier series have, by her noticing a certain element of ordinary life or the landscape and becoming fixated upon it. In this case, it was the seaweed straggling along beaches at places such as the Fundy Trail, Miscou Island and the Irving Nature Park, as well as the lines left by the tides at ferry landings to Grand Manan and elsewhere that got her thinking about high water marks.

"It just starts to evolve," Hill says.

"Gradually you begin to think of this as more than just stuff. Maybe it becomes a metaphor, and maybe you can build something (on that)."

If the show is a sort of visual novel, then its four subsections - Boundaries, Turning Point, Flotsam/Jetsam and Markers - are the chapters. Together, they comprise 11 groups of work made up of more than 60 individual pieces that range from 10-by-10-inch canvases to those that are more than five and six feet across.

In Boundaries, Hill contrasts natural limits with man-made borders, exploring how nature's shifting margins can lay waste to our illusions of dominion and tidy demarcation.

"The high water mark moves. You can't control it," Hill says. "We all know this, but it is interesting to present it in a visual way."

Boundaries is comprised of three sets of works installed together. At the top of the three horizontal lines of canvases is Imposed Boundaries, 16 10-by-10-inch-square works on paper using charts and surveys to show how "we map things off, we grid them." Hill laminated the squares to reinforce their artificiality. The glossy coating also heightens their contrast to the organic works on the bottom row, where nine 24-by-18-inch panels affixed with dark, serpentine clusters of impasto seaweed mimic the way waves strew a beach with detritus.

In the middle of these two extremes is a series of five large, subtle canvases that reflect the contrast between the darker, hard-packed shore below the high water mark and the softer, paler sand above it.

As well as exploring borders, Hill is interested in liminality, and those spaces between the lines. The catalogue for the exhibition includes 140 acres lying south from the water mark, a poem by Saint John poet Anne Compton, that references these ideas:

"Since the tide's full, you'll notice what sea claims of shore.

From high water mark to tide line, there's a between-place, an uncontested corridor neither ocean's or ours, empty as a tickertape before figures, and full of rumour."

Elsewhere in the show, Hill has used human figures to explore parallels between high water marks and the human condition. While the solstices, when the tides are at their highest and most unpredictable, offer a metaphor for turning points in life, the high water mark causes her to question how we gauge achievement.

"Is the high water mark a standard?" she asks. "A measure of worth?"

Hill leaves it to the viewer to answer.

"I think it's important that there's enough ambiguity so that people can fill in the gaps with their own experience, but there's enough there that can pull you through."

While her figures are ambiguous, she says they give the viewer an obvious, emotional entry point into the work. It's natural that we are drawn to images of people, she says.

"If you're a cat, and another cat walks by, you'd be interested."

Visitors to Galerie d'art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen can go into a small room off the main gallery to watch High Water Mark, a short film about Hill and the exhibition.

It is the first of a series of short films produced by The New Brunswick Visual Arts Education Association, which Hill co-founded.

"I was kind of the guinea pig," Hill says. The organization has since filmed Fredericton woodcarver Werner Arnold and painters Molly and Bruno Bobak are confirmed, as is Lt.-Gov. Herménégilde Chiasson.

The films are intended for use in the public school system to teach students about artists working in the province.

"This is the kind of other thing that I get involved in because it's about 'the art,' " Hill says, deepening her voice in mock seriousness, "but it's also about bringing along other people."

In the film, Hill talks about the show and what she wanted to explore, "how we fit in the world, and how the world affects us, but also how we manipulate the world to suit our own ends."

Layers abound in the show, both literal and metaphoric. The heavy black tops and pale, streaky bottoms of Hill's five Jetsam canvases are bisected with layers of collage that blend images and newspaper text with found objects. Each piece "proposes a literal definition of society's jetsam - what is considered superfluous."

When Hill had completed that part of the show, she said to herself, "OK, I've got the jetsam. Now what the hell am I going to do about flotsam?"

She knew she wanted something transparent to hang in front of the jetsam pieces, as flotsam is floating debris. She worked through several ideas in different media, including panels of organza and cheesecloth and drawings, before turning her attention to Plexiglas. She scratched it and drew on it and slathered it with glue until she hit upon an idea that felt right: three long plastic panels left clear at the bottom, the top marred with furniture stripper, and layered with tissue imprinted with words and symbols, "the meaningless repetitive words, phrases, images that 'float' over our debris," she writes.

"If you have time, you can work like that," she says. "I'm not very good at knowing where something is going to be at the end. So if you work the way I do, well, I need to make a lot adjustments as I work."

Hill often experiments with materials. She has played around with modelling paste and cheesecloth, white glue, acrylic medium and wood stain, until she hit upon an effect that worked.

Continuing the literary simile, Hill calls the various techniques and media she deploys in High Water Mark, "using all of the tricks I have to work through this novel.

"Some bits are going to be descriptive and some bits are going to be narrative and some bits are going to do with characters."

Her challenge is to find the best way to communicate an idea visually.

"If it seems to require text, I'll do that. If it needs fabric or Plexiglas, great!"

Hill says she has learned that if she thinks a work is about a day from completion, then it is probably already done.

"My tendency is to overdo it, so I take things away," she says, peeling bits of fabric she had layered on a large work-in-progress nailed to the wall of her studio, the bright afternoon sun flowing in through a wall of window that offers a clear view of uptown rooftops and the harbour.

"It's not bronzed. It's not carved in stone," she says, picking at a section that she's not happy with. "What's nice is to have that freedom."

The canvas, which depicts a figure with her back hunched away from the viewer, is part of a group show with Toby Graser and Kathy Hooper that will open at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton in 2010.

The layered fabric technique is trademark Hill. She stumbled upon it by accident when she was deep into preparations for Carapaces, a 1994 solo show.

She had made some figurative paintings "that really sucked." Hill had been doing some collage on board, and struck on the idea of using rough strips of unbleached cotton to give the figure texture and visual interest. She's been using it ever since.

"A lot of it is just being too cheap to use too much paint," she says.

While Hill puts a serious amount of time into her work, painting or drawing most days, she is far from precious about her art. And she's the first to say that it is not the only thing in her life.

It never has been.

It has only been in the last 10 years, after retiring from teaching art at Kennebecasis Valley High School, that she has painted full-time.

"I never emerged," she says, slyly referring to the current craze in the art world for emerging artists whose careers are just beginning.

"They didn't have artist-run centres when I was starting out," she says.

"There wasn't as much soul-searching and intense analysis about the biz."

When she retired, "there was a moment when I thought maybe I should try to get a gallery in Toronto," she says, but it was an idea she let pass.

"I haven't the time, never did have the time, to market myself."

She doesn't need to. Her resumé runs long with solo and group shows; there isn't a year in the last 25 when she hasn't been exhibiting somewhere, mostly in New Brunswick, as well as a couple of shows in Nova Scotia and one in Germany.

Hill's work is represented in provincial and national collections, including the New Brunswick Provincial Art Bank, the University of New Brunswick, University of Maine, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the Governor General of Canada, External Affairs Canada and the Canada Council ArtBank.

In 1999, she won the Strathbutler Award, which, at $10,000, is the richest art prize in New Brunswick. She has been awarded other grants and prizes, including a creation grant from ArtsNB for High Water Mark.

Hill recalls being invited to be part of a panel discussion years ago to speak on the idea of "having it all," a popular notion in the '80s, when women were returning to the workforce in droves. For Hill, that meant finding a balance between teaching, her art and her family.

"I worked to support my habit," she says. "And my habit was such that I never had to make my living from it."

That's still the case. She is beholden to no one, be it dealer, curator or viewer.

"When I walk into my studio, it's my world, and there are no restraints on what I can do."

Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.