Undertow is that subterranean pull of the unconscious, ominous with premonition. Used as the title of Susan Norrie’s major work for the epic spaces of ACCA’s commission hall, it suggests the hidden terrors and delights of a world in environmental flux.

Undertow is simultaneously an overwhelming and deeply meditative video installation, one of the most ambitious that Susan Norrie has created, and the culmination of several years of experimentation and development in her art practice. Undertow portrays the world in a state of both beauty and terror, shuddering with natural and unnatural events which verge on the catastrophic.

The viewer is immersed in images of ominous tempests, delicate spring blossoms, bubbling mud pools, swirling clouds of dust, and scientific experiments which manifestly cannot make sense of these phenomena. The range and scale of images has a vertiginous and unsettling effect that pulls at the viewer's unconscious.