Sue Blandford

Sue Blandford

I first came across Sue’s work at Stockwell Studios exhibitions in the 1990s. She had recently moved to London from East Anglia, from an open landscape to a closed inner-city environment. Her work then was largely huge ink drawings on paper, the familiar and the symbolic juxtaposed in an almost monochrome world. Some of these symbols: the ladder, a chair, huts continue to populate her work but the monochrome has moved through the shadows and emerging half lights of morning and evening to the rich turquoise and gold of her latest paintings.

As her work moved from paper and ink to acrylic and board, it moved also from the interior world of symbols and archetypes to a more intense connection with the real world beyond the studio. She says the shift began one evening in Southwold Harbour where an evening light lit up a collection of objects familiar from her own drawings. She says it was a relief to realise images outside of herself could contain the same deep personal resonances. Although her painting is still studio based she works from her own photographs; a real world albeit a very particular one.

To become familiar with Sue’s work is to be familiar with the transient, the discarded, the broken – but not the hopeless. Even an abandoned supermarket trolley in a weir is suffused with light.

‘Between’ is a word I think of when I reflect on the paintings. Between East Anglia and London; between her Jamaican mother and English father, between the sea and the land, morning and day, evening and dark. The works are set in liminal spaces. We are invited, not to enter, but to hover between, unseen, unsure. There is nowhere settled and stable, the places of possible habitation are fragile: tents, glasshouses, drifting or landlocked boats; transitory places that are too fragile to be a home. Even the vegetation is of the edgelands: desiccated heads of teasel and cow parsley, thin buddleia spilling over a wall. But the paintings remind us that these places are also places of survival, of fragile resistance, of belief. Here in the forgotten places light is entering the world.

There are no people: a silhouette on a tent wall, the movement of water around a figure, but even these are rare events. However, although the paintings are empty of people a human presence is everywhere. Discarded objects shimmer with past touch; the chairs have been sat on, the door once opened. These things are not just the detritus of human existence but are marked with love. They speak of usage and now of attending, of patience. The glass houses wait out winter, nets for the seas to rise, ladders for angels to enter the world.

In many paintings the palette is limited, often dark, but always light enters this dark: the unearthly glow of a white chair against the dark autumn night; the last of the light hitting the glasshouse and being held, the tents like luminescent jellyfish floating in the night. The landscapes are predominantly blue, the sky reflected in the land, the water. Blue is a favourite colour, there are touches in most paintings: the blue white of snow, the shadow on a tap or a touch among leaves as though a piece of sky has landed. Blue has long been associated with the celestial and in the latest paintings it becomes turquoise, a pure spirit of a colour. Sue used it, she said, because it felt like an icon colour and it does. The latest paintings are of roadside shrines in Crete, small house-like enclosures on long, thin metal legs. The colour in these paintings is richer than any of hers I have seen before; intense turquoise, gold, an almost mahogany earth all held together with the purity of white; the white shrine, the white stems of cow parsley that reach up past the shrine into the explosion of turquoise beyond.

These are paintings that invite the viewer into a moment transformed: by light, by paint, by a way of seeing that takes the familiar and makes of it something extraordinary.

Jennifer Vuglar
Art Historian/writer

Exhibitions

Was born in London in 1964 to Jamaican and British parents.

Moving to Norfolk soon after but returning in 1998.

Since graduating from Norwich School of Art in 1991 she has undertaken artists residencies, taught in a range of arts classes including Norwich Prison, schools at all levels, adult education, galleries and most recently co-running a ceramics facility at a special needs centre. As well as co-running a community gallery and various arts facilities, she reviewed dance theatre for London Arts Board. During this time the Japanese form Butoh was an important influence on her work as are the soundscapes she listens to in her studio.

She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her sculpture and paintings in private and public collections include; commissions for hospitals, private interiors, workspaces and as part of the Knebworth House sculpture restoration.

2021 Chappel Galleries solo exhibition

2018 Solo show: Glasshouses & Daydreams, Viva, London

2017 Cavaliero Finn, London

2016 Beauty in the everyday, Cavaliero Finn, London
Cavaliero Finn, Open Door, London

2015 ‘Time and tides’, The Hide Gallery, London
Dulwich Arts Festival, London

2014 The Dairy Gallery, Londonart
South London Women Artists, London
Dulwich Arts Festival, London

2013 ‘Swimming against the tide’, The Hide Gallery, London
‘Up the tempo’, Londonart
Solo exhibition, Romeo Jones, London

2012 Solo Show, ‘Winter’s Edge’, Norwich
Lambeth Open, London

2011 Annie McCall Hospital, London
Art at the Claremont, Hove
Solo Exhibition, Bromley Arts Centre, London

2010 Bankside Gallery, London
Dulwich Arts Festival, London

2009 Portrait Exhibition,The Centre, London
Stockwell Studios Summer Exhibition, London

2008 Brighton Arts Festival

2005 Annie McCall Hospital, London

2003 Solo Exhibition, King of Hearts Gallery, Norwich

2001 Selected Show, London Art Company

2000 Commissioned sculptures, Knebworth House Restoration
Painted Card collection for Victoria & Albert Museum

1999 Stockwell Studios Summer Exhibition, London
Gallery Wahrenberger, Zurich

1997 3 group exhibitions at Wrentham Gallery, Suffolk
Summer Exhibition, Copula Gallery, Sheffield
Gallery Wahrenberger, Zurich

1996 The Warehouse group show, Norwich
Bronze, Marbella, Spain

1995 Solo Exhibition, King of Hearts Gallery, Norwich

1994 Castle Art Show, Norwich Castle Museum,
Alternative Arts, London

1993 Castle Museum, Norwich
Group exhibition, King of Hearts Gallery, Norwich

1992 Warehouse Artists, Contact Gallery, Norwich
Selected show, King of Hearts Gallery, Norwich

1991 Fresh Art, Business & Design Centre, London
Contact Gallery, Norwich
King of Hearts Gallery, Norwich