ABOUT SUZETTE CLOUGH

I have lived in London for over thirty years. I originally trained at the Phyllis Shillito School of Design in Sydney, Australia - my birthplace. After doing a two year course in colour and graphic design I then went to Sydney College of the Arts where I studied painting. During the first year at art school I suffered a psychotic breakdown which took the form of crippling anxiety and depression. I did not know it then but this experience would be the catalyst, and later the ground for my work as a psychotherapist and artist.

Slowly from the ashes of my breakdown my creative practice deepened and I found myself looking for ways to authentically connect my emotional lived experience to my painting practice. I tried to create paintings that both emanated and evoked emotion by making paintings with focussed feelings in mind to transmit those feelings - like energetic memory boxes. I wanted to convey the invisible emotional field into and onto the canvas believing that field can be felt even whilst not being fully understood by the artist or viewer. Ongoingly my work tried to embrace questions of: who am I? what is the real purpose of art? can art heal me? how can I work with art as a healing practice with other people?

As I made faltering steps in my emotional recovery I left Australia and went travelling with in the States and Europe with dear friends. My questions still burned and my creative practice took another turn when I decided to move to London and train as a psychotherapist at the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy. This was a radical life changing 5-year training in somatic embodied psychotherapy that included bodywork, massage and Gestalt therapy.

Alongside an intensive practitioner training I entered into an almost 20-year personal psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This experience of being undone and remade forms an energetic substrate, a literal psychic layer within my paintings. I often paint over surfaces many times - sometimes over decades by building up surface as memory and digging into the layers until the painting reaches a conclusion that allows it to tell its own story. The painting has a life which evolves with me and through me.

My later working practice has evolved in the sense that I now feel that I am conductor + co-creator with the materials. The paintings flow through me as a communication that has built into a creational language telling less of my personal story allowing a more Universal collaboration with what I call the Pattern Creation Ancestors - the originating creation ancestors - who tell their stories through the body of the world within shapes or LI patterns.