Susan Liggett is primarily a painter whose work explores personal memory within the traditional genres of landscape, figure, and still life painting. Ideas for her work originate from psychological resonances or echoes in the mind that are generated from the experience of the world around her that often feel richer than the actual experience itself. Her PhD explored this notion of ‘psychological resonance’ in the work of five contemporary painters.

 

In the last few years Susan has challenged her long established working methods in light of the digital age and has created new opportunities and ways of working; including collaborative projects in health care settings and utilizing video alongside her painting. Recent work transforms digital photographs into paintings in order to understand a more intimate inner experience of what is depicted. She works from family snapshots, usually including her daughter in order to re-live moments that she felt she was too busy to fully experience at the time. Her engagement with the physicality of paint, its materiality, its messiness and smell connects her to something that feels grounding and instinctive.

 

Painting is seductive, it can repel or move us in unexpected ways, it roots ourselves in the word and brings the subjective into the objective. Susan’s work explores how painting has been rejuvenated by the digital age and can transform screen based images back into physical objects to offer a different and challenging view of the world.

 

Susan has been working at Glyndwr University part time since 2000 prior to working and exhibiting as an artist in London. She continues to paint, exhibit and curate exhibitions and also writes papers for conferences and art and design research related publications. She has a PhD from the University of Wales, a Post Graduate Diploma in Painting (MA) from The Royal Academy Schools, and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University. She was selected for the Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize in 2014 and is an associate member of Suite Studio Group, Salford. She is a Reader and Head of the Media Art and Design Research Centre at Glyndwr University