Susie Hamilton

My style has been called ‘iconoclastic’ since my painting is a process of construction and defacement. I paint people in urban or natural wilderness where not only is the setting challenging in bleakness or ferocity, but the materials of pastel, charcoal, pencil and paint assert themselves against the figures. My materials are not simply employed as servants of representation, made to depict shoppers, samurai, explorers, surgeons, riders etc., but are used to assail the people depicted with blots, spots, lines or veils. My figures are invaded by pencil marks, obscured by thin layers of oil or dissolved into acrylic fluidity, with the result that they are transformed into hybrids who seem either fragile or predatory. My ‘alchemical’ process of making and unmaking leads to remaking, to the creation of uncertain and enigmatic images hovering between abstraction and figuration and between human and non-human, as if the human is always vulnerable to being transformed. My work is overwhelmingly inspired by the idea of metamorphosis, with figures and their settings continually undergoing mutation.

Born in 1950 Lives and works in London