Since graduating in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in 1999 and then moving to South Wales in 2001, Susie’s work has evolved from the wild and vivid paintings of the Welsh Mountain weather in all its beauty and terror to look more closely at the environment of this special landscape. Her work has become more intricate and now involves printmaking, bookmaking and drawing as well as making tiny and larger tableaux. Susie explores the world through patterns found in flora and fauna and what is often over looked. She uncovers the lost and hidden away, the work evolves from these hidden things found in constructed environments of both the home and garden.
‘The passage of time is carefully monitored. How much is left? I watch the evening light grow softer until the darkness makes it hard to see as I draw the landscape. Next day blue sky dawns, Spring has begun again. I walk across the meadow, through the wood, over the mountain and look up into the sky. I watch the day grow and take shape. I take colours of sky, meadow and mountain and begin to mix paint. Colour matching flora and fauna and sky and clouds that change moment by moment. I stand beneath the new tent of green leaves in the wood, wade through bracken, climb mountains. Spring turns to Summer as I make notes, sketch and photograph. By now I am surrounded by colour within my studio and without. I begin to paint on the boards and the special paper that I have spent a cold hard winter preparing, layer upon layer of gesso, ready for the oil paint. The paint is fluid, a mix of my own making. I have jars of the colours of spring and summer and autumn before me, row upon row, in my mountain top studio. Using my own hands, brushes, palette knives and last years brittle Rose Bay Willow Herb sticks, the colours are applied in a fluid gestural movement. As weeks pass, the year getting older, layer upon layer of paint builds up over each painting. The everyday becomes fixed, Spring Flowers Dance Skyward has become frozen in paint.
The longest day has passed. Now the days draw in minute by minute, towards the Autumn then the Winter. Measuring time it rushes by, pauses, finally stops – for each of us. Without pause the year ends and then another begins. I wait for the first snowdrops, take out charcoal, ink and paper and begin to take in the landscape and the until the darkness draws in.’