SUZETTE CLOUGH

Painting is my way of listening to Earth, entering into relationship with Creation, and making visible what ordinarily remains unseen.

From my earliest childhood, I have been drawn to Material - mud, wool, paper, offcuts from my mother's dressmaking, pocketfuls of stones and shells. Making things was how I came to know the world. Painting followed naturally, becoming both a lifelong enquiry and a way of finding myself when life had utterly undone me. I have been painting for more than five decades.

Over these years, I have come to understand painting as an act of deep listening. Through Material, I encounter presences and patterns that I have come to know as the Pattern Creation Ancestors - ancient creational intelligences whose forms and movements emerge through paint, pigment, water and the physical processes of making.

My paintings are encounters with Earth and Ancestor Stories. They arise through a relationship with the living intelligence of Creation, revealing patterns and presences beyond my conscious intention.

Painting is my spirit practice - an alchemical relationship with Earth, Big Nature and the multiverse of Invisible Worlds.

EarthWorks

At the heart of my painting practice is EarthWorks, an ongoing body of paintings made through my relationship with natural pigments, beeswax, earth, dust, metals and paint.

Some works are small enough to rest in the palm of a hand - others extend to five metres, holding vast fields of pattern that evoke the skin, body and elemental forces of Earth. These paintings emerge as living ecologies - carrying the resonance of wind, lightning, sunlight on water, stone, soil, trees, animals and fire.

Within their forms I recognise the corporeal presences of Earth Devas, ancestral intelligences and the deep patterns of Creation. At a time of accelerating climate change, species loss and ecological destruction, my paintings are acts of witnessing and remembrance. They invite us to recognise Earth not as a passive resource, but as a living reciprocal presence with whom we are profoundly entangled.

To paint is to participate in Creation and remember that we too belong to the world.