Susan Laughton – Sanctuary 1

My paintings and drawings evolve from half-remembered glimpses seen from the corner of my eye, fleeting juxtapositions elusive to photography, the dislocated reverie of long car journeys, or from more studied compositions.

The landscape is my starting point, not as a picturesque or static view, but as a space travelled through and experienced often on the edges of the urban and the rural. It is a source of man made and natural structures, surfaces and colour from which my reductive personal responses develop. Man made structures in particular impose their presence: telegraph poles, fences, power lines, isolated buildings – structures that create tension within space and mark the passage of time and distance.

Process and materials are important to me as a way of allowing the paintings to emerge as objects in their own right. Structured and methodical approaches combined with spontaneous and intuitive reactions allow me to plan and take risks: to combine control with ‘let‘s see what happens if…’