St Martins School of Art and a specialist course in visual merchandising paved the way for Sue to spend several years as Display and Exhibition Designer with the French perfume house Christian Dior.
Switching direction completely, she then worked in the third sector with organisations supporting disability and life altering conditions. Her design roots never left, so she combined this new career with kick starting the family interiors studio, along with establishing an online gallery.
Sue has painted all her life, but until 2016 quietly and for herself. Now, she is back to where perhaps where she should have been all along!
“My creative practice comes from an inner space of imaginations and thought, with elements of the natural and man-made landscapes above and beneath me. From my work with people whose life had been seismically shifted by trauma or illness, I learned how to see things from a very different perspective.
Oil paint is my preferred medium to express and document the world as I see and feel it. My view is an abstracted one and I aim to create strong pieces that have complexity, not revealing themselves fully all at once.”
Building up multiple layers with my hands, a business card or palette knife, then sanding, scoring, or erasing to reveal or obscure a memory of something previous. Often an accident or element of chance takes the work down a different and important route, to where the composition, theme and balance of colour, line and form are settled.
Roots in the Sussex Downs and South Wales, a heart for the desert and colour of North Africa, and the comfort of home in Norfolk, along with the damage and joy of man and machine, inspire and move me.”