Susie Hamilton | |
---|---|
Born | London, England |
Education | St. Martins School of Art, London Byam Shaw School of Art, London |
Alma mater | Birkbeck, University of London |
Website | http://www.susiehamilton.co.uk/ |
Susie Hamilton (born 10 August 1950) is an English artist.[1] She lives and works in London and is represented by Paul Stolper Gallery.[2][3]
Hamilton, born 10 August 1950, 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. She gained a PHd on metamorphosis of identity in Shakespearean drama in 1989 at Birkbeck.[4][5]
Hamilton’s style has been called ‘iconoclastic’ since her painting is a process of making and unmaking. A member of the painting collective Contemporary British Painting,[2] Hamilton works with Hospital Rooms Arts and Mental Health Charity, painting murals in psychiatric intensive care units, contributing work to their charity auctions and leading workshops online and in hospitals.[6][7] In 2022 she completed 3 large paintings based on Chinese poetry for the central staircase of the new hospital in Tooting. In 2021 she painted a triptych for Askew psychiatric intensive care unit in Hammersmith, with a filmed interview by Ben Luke as part of the WHO programme, “Healing Arts: The Future is Unwritten”.[8] In 2018, she made ‘Polar Light’, a large wall-painting for ‘The Junipers’ psychiatric unit in Exeter.[9]
In 2020, she made a series of work showing doctors, nurses and patients facing Covid-19,[10] some of which are now held by The Science Museum.[11]
Her paintings are represented in Picturing People by Charlotte Mullins (Thames and Hudson, 2015)[12][13] and ‘On Margate Sands: PaintIngs and Drawings based on Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, 2018.[14] 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.[15][16] In 2015 Hamilton was artist-in-residence at St. Paul's Cathedral, London.[17][18]
Hamilton has been called a "flâneur" since she observes from the sidelines, scrutinising tourists, shoppers, holidaymakers, diners, hen nights and other scenes of leisure. She has to work extremely quickly to catch particular movements and poses and this means that her figures are compressed, abbreviated and simplified and usually morph into something misshapen and grotesque.[19] Of her work Hamilton has said "I often wanted to paint joy (as well as its opposite)."[20]