W. Mark Sutherland: In Memoriam by Karl Jirgens
On Jan. 1, 2024, Canada and the world lost a distinctive and original intermedia artist. W. Mark Sutherland (1955-2024) Canadian visual artist, poet, performer, musician, and performance artist, passed away eight months after being diagnosed with cancer. Mark Sutherland’s artistic creations blur the borders of poetry, visual art, music, and performance, while investigating language, images, and sounds. His texts, poetry, visual constructions, and scores were published internationally, and his creations have appeared in galleries, festivals, and solo shows across Europe—in England, France, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy—and in the USA and Canada. […] Sutherland was highly adept at crossing over between media, and he ranks among the finest practitioners of that art. He was cognisant of his various heritages, including the works of Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Ball, Raoul Hausmann and more recent creators such as Henri Chopin, Bernard Hiedsieck, and Sten Hanson. Sutherland was also fully aware of contemporary expression and was remarkably in touch with current artistic endeavours on a global level.
W. Mark Sutherland, RIP by Paul Dutton
On January 1, 2024, the intermedia art world lost a significant and unique Canadian voice, and Musicworks lost a valued friend and supporter, when W. Mark Sutherland succumbed to leukemia weeks before his sixty-ninth birthday. Mark was a musician, a sound and installation artist, as well as a pioneering poet who worked in print, sound, performance, video, visual, and electronic forms. He exhibited and performed in galleries and festivals throughout Europe and across North and South America, and created a wealth of innovative poetry across media, ranging from elegant, layered, minimalist settings of words to the complex, keyboard-interactive masterpiece Code X, which lures the reader into an addictive collaboration of multi-levelled fun. His sonic creations work pervasively with silence, while his lyric, semantic, and abstract literary offerings remain in limited-edition artist’s books. Generous repositories of his output—including Code X, the CD Sonotexts (which “may well mark a critical development in sound poetry,” critic Julian Cowley wrote in The Wire), and extensive other PDF, sound, and video files—reside on his labyrinthine website, his YouTube channel, and Spotify, all richly rewarding exploration.
Sutherland also made vital contributions behind the scenes as a proponent and producer of projects in his chosen spheres, offering encouragement and advice, and contributing to fundraising efforts. Musicworks gratefully benefitted from his knowledge of magazines and the international sound-art scene through fifteen years of volunteer work on our board of directors. Musicworks, the sound-arts community, and lovers of venturesome art are saddened by his departure and enriched by his legacy.
FYI: Learn more about W. Mark Sutherland and his creative work online at <wmarksutherland.com>. Mark was the subject of a feature article in Musicworks 85, Spring 2003.