Susie Hamilton: Unbound

'Unbound' is a solo exhibition of new painting, prints and works on paper by Susie Hamilton at Paul Stolper Gallery until 11 June. Literature is a constant influence on her work and the new paintings, drawings and prints all have poems or plays as a source. They are also connected by the image of The Rider.

Hamilton says: 

"I have painted The Rider as an ecstatic or combative figure or as a solitary wanderer journeying through wilderness. And it is this last image that inspired my Gawain series where Sir Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew and a Knight of the Round Table, embarks on a desolate winter journey and fights with fantastical creatures on his way to his appointed meeting with the Green Knight. The figure in this sequence is dwarfed, alone and surrounded by cellular forms which represent some of the uncanny aspects of his expedition.

In a second group of works I have fused images of samurai with those of horsemen from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. Marlowe elevates his hero in gorgeous language full of reds, golds and cosmic imagery. What Ben Jonson called Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ enacts the aspiring visions of the conqueror. However the energy and radiance of the blank verse are imbued with extreme violence. And despite the glamour of the warriors, the horror of conflict is an obvious element of my work and is represented visually by mess and blots and smoky layers and rolls of colour which undo form and cohesion. The vitality of the horseman is also counteracted by an appearance of erosion, with areas of the paintings defaced or wiped away as if mutilated by time. The movement of combat is therefore halted and stilled.

My figures are vulnerable to nature, time and to each other but also to the materials of pencil, charcoal, pastel, water and paint. I like to paint people in challenging places and then subject them to an ‘iconoclastic’ method of working which makes and unmakes them. I draw over bodies, obscure them with smears and blurs, dissolve them into fluidity or turn them into semi-abstract forms in order to pull the known towards the unknown.

These equivocal, abstracted shapes, representing figures or surrounding them as part of a landscape, suggest reality changing and expanding. The familiar is morphing into the mysterious as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in which supernatural and everyday are interconnected. And, inspired by the stealthy, hidden forces of fate or ‘wyrd’ in this poem, I allow areas of painting to make themselves, since I let paint ooze, creep, flow and curdle into ‘weird’ shapes outside my control. These involuntary marks express for me the unseen motions of the Anglo-Saxon concept of ‘wyrd’, from which our modern word, ‘weird’ is derived.

‘Unbound’ refers therefore to the freedom and energy of horses and riders but also to the way in which my painting is unshackled from realism in order to transform and make strange a recognisable figure, object or landscape."

"My work focuses on figures in wilderness. This wilderness may be literal (the arctic) or metaphorical (the superstore) but both can be arenas for transformation. I paint in thin veils of acrylic which burst boundaries and destroy contours to suggest mutation and deliquescence and show figures as stretched, pulverized, unstable, 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 to me, 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, I like the sensation of an obscure but intriguing presence that reminds me 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."

Hamilton's works have recently been bought by The British Museum, The Science Museum, Imperial College London and feature in key private collections such as Deutsche Bank and Damien Hirst’s Murderne collection. Her work has received wide media coverage, her Covid-19 series were featured in many outlets including The Art Newspaper and Studio International magazine. She originally studied Fine Art and drawing at St. Martin’s School of Art and Byam Shaw School of Art and she has a first-class degree and a PhD in English literature from the University of London.

Hamilton is the recipient of many awards including the Graham Hamilton Drawing Prize. She is painting three large murals for Hospital Rooms at the new Springfield Hospital, Tooting this spring, a charity that she has worked for since 2018. She lives and works in London.

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C.O.B. - Sheba's Return/Lion Of Judah.