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 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 - like energetic memory boxes filled with the invisible.

I left Australia and went travelling in the States and Europe - 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 a 20-year personal psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This experience of being undoing and remaking forms an energetic substrate 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 into me as conductor and co-creator with the materials. The paintings flow through me as a communication, which has built into a creational language with the Pattern Creation Ancestors - the originating creation ancestors - who tell their stories through the paintings.