Sue Smedley

oil pastel, soft pastel and charcoal on paper prepared with rust, fallen leaves and bark chippings at the allotment
triptych 100.5cms x 50cms (30cms x 42cms each)
Title Gifting The Hagstone

Exploring the idea of being outside a community, being discarded, neglected, unwanted, expressed through a narrative of my connection to the foxes at the allotment. A story as metaphor for human society where some are perceived as outsiders, lacking entitlement, and the problematic separation of human from nature. The fox encapsulates the idea of an outsider, but it is an ambivalent relation: vagrant and persecuted or trickster and predator.

Joyce W. Cairns wanted to “challenge traditional pictorial space“ and I see this in her later work, Inside Looking Out (2020) which creates an imagined space, disrupting scale and perspective. Her work encouraged me to experiment with composition and symbolism, narrative and a blurred yet intense gaze.

“ I feel confident to make use of sketchbooks and of research into others’ artworks to develop my work in terms of the subject, materials and processes and to explore how these things work together. My practice going forward will focus on pastels, found material, narratives in imagined spaces, on autobiography, nature, folklore and rituals, symbolism and the slightly magical. ”

STUDENT SHOWS

Sue Smedley