Sutton Gallery is pleased to present START, an installation and photo book by Susan Long that explores the archive and the unstable materiality of original artifacts and their stored copy/record.

START sees Long engaging with the archival process of museum and library collections which hold incalculable quantities of historical documents: photographs, books, pamphlets, manuscripts, newspapers, typescripts, letters, diagrams, plans, maps, diaries, drawings, and calculations – all of which for logistical reasons, are recorded and stored on 35mm film. Through interrogating this process Long reveals that when working with microfilmed archive, two elements of the original and its record integrate and separate at the same time. Even as the original manuscript remains perceptible, qualities of the film itself engage the eye and a second reading of the object emerges.  The microfilm record is bound with the identical markers of conventional filmmaking – START, END, reinforcing a parallel filmic interpretation with the promise of narrative.

Susan Long is a Melbourne based artist and film maker and is currently Librarian, Pictures Collection at the State Library of Victoria. She received a Master of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, in 2000.