Susie Hamilton

May 29 - June 5

I paint people in a wilderness. This may be a natural one, an ice-field or outer space, or it may be an impersonal, alienating public place such as a supermarket, casino or shopping mall. All these settings seem to me to challenge or oppose the human figure and all are characterised by glaring light which exposes and assaults it.

I put my figures in difficult places and then make them more vulnerable by my “iconoclastic” method of painting. I use the messy, unpredictable nature of paint to depict people who are similarly inchoate. They are attacked by blots, they dissolve into fluidity or turn into nameless shapes so that figure and figurative representation are transformed. Metamorphosis is central to my work and includes metamorphosis into abstraction through which images are made into something unfamiliar.
In early April I was contacted by consultant hepatologist and art collector, Dr Peter Collins. He had bought my paintings before and thought that images of doctors and patients in Covid Wards might be interesting subjects for my work. He sent me photographs from his Bristol hospital and I then sourced more from news and documentaries. I did indeed respond to this subject, finding the isolation of medics in PPE and the defencelessness of the patients in the clinical, neon-lit settings inspirational. I got to work in my lockdown studio in our kitchen, painting in acrylic on the cardboard from delivery boxes as well as on paper.

The images from the wards also appealed to me because of my preference for painting figures that are in some way hidden: made into silhouettes, obscured by darkness or light or masked by veils, hoods or unusual, specialised coverings. Similar to my series of ‘Polar Explorers’ and ‘Astronauts’ (in which figures are made strange by equipment which conceals them) my doctors/nurses are metamorphosed through their hoods and visors. Some appear like creatures from Hieronymus Bosch, even reminiscent of 16th plague doctors (below), while others have an angelic quality with light shining from them or bursting on them. I imagined their alien appearance to be especially dramatic for the patient and so painted pictures from this point of view with the nurse or doctor looming over the figure on a bed.

So Metamorphosis continues to be a trigger for me and a source of fear or mystery. And while inspiring my doctor figures it applies to the image of the patient as well. I want to contrast the doctors/nurses in their high-tech kit with the image of the struggling patient, reduced to an obscure, messy shape among tubes and wires. The appearance of both doctor and patient is transformed in this alien and frightening situation. c. Susie Hamilton May 2020

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