Susie Hamilton studied painting at St Martins School of Art and Byam Shaw School of Art in London (now Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London) before reading English Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her paintings are held in public and private collections which include Murderme (the art collection of Damien Hirst), The Priseman Seabrook Collection, The Deutsche Bank Art Collection, The Economist, The Bernard Jacobson Collection, Groucho Club, New Hall Art Collection University of Cambridge and The Methodist Modern Art Collection, London. In 2015 Hamilton was artist-in-residence at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.
Her work focuses on figures in the wilderness. This wilderness may be literal (the arctic) or metaphorical (the superstore) but both can be arenas for transformation. She paints in thin veils of acrylic which burst boundaries and destroy contours to suggest mutation and deliquescence and show figures as stretched, pulverized, unstable, and vulnerable. Such mutation is not just change within the human but beyond it, with figures grotesquely or uncannily turned into humanoid, hybrid things or into blots, cells, messes, silhouettes and, especially, abstract shapes. The representational overtaken by abstraction is important, partly because it feels like an extreme way of challenging the figure’s identity but also because it is a way of showing the familiar tipping over into the unfamiliar, of reaching a point where the recognizable gives way to unnamed shapes. Before finding out what an object is, Hamilton likes the sensation of an obscure but intriguing presence that reminds her of something as yet unlabeled. It dramatizes and contrasts two ways of seeing – in terms of names or of nameless shapes. It is an attempt to get behind the familiar to a sensation of menace or mystery.
Self-taught or art school?
Art School, St Martins School of Art, London and Byam Shaw School of Art, London
If you could own one work of art what would it be?
Titian’s ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’
How would you describe your style?
Iconoclastic: I undo parts of the image by the materials used to create it. The painting is a process of making and unmaking. But this leads to remaking since the realistic image mutates into something else as my materials modify it. The materials of paint, water, pastel, charcoal and pencil are therefore important to me in a particular way since the spot, streak, bloom or line which invades, escapes or attacks the image contrast with what is controlled, predictable and recognisable. Floating beside or impertinently overriding a human figure, for example, suggest the presence of the nonhuman, unconscious or unseen: cells, bodily processes or something hovering outside awareness.
Is narrative important within your work?
Up to a point. I don’t have a detailed story in mind when doing a painting but my figures are often particular types in a particular situation—often going on a journey through the wilderness.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
Cy Twombly for his Bacchanalian carnival of defacement and erasure and the lavish, visceral colours in these works. Titian for the dramatic moment of impact between the 2 figures. Brueghel for the phantasmagoria of some of his landscapes and his comical little figures in his genre scenes.
What or who inspires your art?
Literature especially lyric poetry with its single, ‘I’ voice, and Shakespeare, especially the meeting of 2 realities (mundane and supernatural) in tragedies, comedies and romances.
Drawing from observation in shops, on beaches and in restaurants, in order to transform figures through the inevitable speed of drawing.
Are there any recurring themes within your work and can you tell us about them?
The wilderness and metamorphosis of figures in challenging environments. Transformation of humans into creatures who are vulnerable or predatory so that the painting is an arena of human struggles.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
In the East End of London. It’s a large space with an etching press for making monotypes. I can also work on many paintings and drawings at once and work on series which are laid flat on the floor so that I can see them from all sides.
Do you have any studio rituals?
No noise, including music. But no rituals.
What are you working on currently?
Series of figures in landscapes: urban and natural.
Where can we buy your art?
Through my gallery Paul Stolper, Museum St., London, www.paulstolper.com
What are your ambitions? To discover new areas, preoccupations and adventures in my painting. To keep working with the art and mental health charity ‘Hospital Rooms’
For more information visit:
Instagram: @susie9hamilton
