Susan Brinkhurst
Susan Brinkhurst is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, large-scale charcoal drawing, installation, textile and film, working with natural materials gathered from the landscape such as wood, mud, reeds and stones. She studied Fine Art Sculpture and Textiles in London and Nottingham. Over more than twenty years she has exhibited extensively in the UK, Europe and the USA, completed private commissions, and had work featured in publications and held in public collections. She was a visiting lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts and the University of Suffolk and taught part-time from 2000 to 2014, initiating overseas study trips and student residencies to Finland. She has led workshops and projects within schools and community groups, and served as Community Arts Coordinator for Lowestoft's First Light Festival from 2019 to 2023. Much of her recent work centres on a long-term project exploring the landscapes and waterways of the River Alde in Suffolk, including MUD: The Upper Alde Estuary, a collaboration with photographer Eamonn McCabe shown at Snape Maltings.
Artist Statement
My practice is led by materials and process. Each work begins as a response to the environment, asking how art might reframe our ways of looking and deepen our awareness of the places we inhabit as they shift through history and under the pressures of climate change causing displacement and migration.
My pieces emerge through direct encounters with the landscape. I often work with what I can gather - wood, mud, reeds, stones - allowing these materials to act as both medium and mark. Each drawing or sculpture becomes a physical exchange: a record of presence, attention, and response.
The act of making is repetitive, ritualistic, and meditative. It forms a cycle that folds time back on itself, reminding us of an earlier way of being - one more closely connected with the rhythms of nature. In this slow dialogue with place, the work becomes less about representation and more an invitation to pause, to sense more deeply, and to enter the circular rhythms that shape both land and self.