A year after her successful group exhibition at the ArtHouse, showcasing the students attending her regular mixed media drawing and painting courses held at the Cricket Club in Mawdesley and the studio room at Brookside in Ormskirk, the spotlight will now be firmly focused on Suzanne Riley’s own artistic repertoire for her celebratory solo show at the same gallery in Southport this autumn.
Having enjoyed working across various mediums throughout her career, the breadth of Suzanne’s considerable talent will be well to the fore in an ambitious show that will encompass the extensiveness of her artistic skills.
“My background is in constructed textiles which focused primarily on weaving, knit, stitch, spinning, yarn design and felt making. My interest in drawing and painting was apparent as an infant with colour and texture always being a passion.”
A graduate in Textile Design in the 1980s, Suzanne went on to work at one of the largest woolen mills in the North West – Joseph Hoyle and Sons – designing woven fabrics for premiere women’s fashion labels, Jaeger, Planet and Aquascutum before completing a FE teaching diploma that ultimately steered her towards lecturing at West Lancashire College (formerly Skelmersdale and Ormskirk College).
“During my 34 years teaching career I’ve had many opportunities to explore other art and design related specialisms such as mixed media textiles, print and ceramics. Favourite combinations of textile techniques and processes include Batik, Applique, Free Motion Embroidery and Dissolvable fabric applications all combined in one creative outcome. My preferred combinations of media for painting include a watercolour/ink base with applications of gouache, chalk pastel, oil pastel and graphite.”
Suzanne generates most of her artistic stimulation direct from Nature: “Organic shapes, the natural landscape, the changing seasons, flowers, foliage, seedpods, seaweed and seashells are all inspirational sources. Their naturally occurring patterns, textures, surfaces and colour combinations never cease to amaze me and are regularly incorporated into my artwork.”
In particular, Suzanne expresses an enthusiastic passion for all varieties of winter-flowering Hellebores: “Their shapes, colours, textures and forms are stunning and provide an excellent starting point for developing design ideas or simply recording as an observational mixed media painting/drawing. Their seedpods, too, are such intricate shapes, quite charming!”
The exhibition will be grouped into examples of Textiles, Painting and Drawing.
Seldom restricting herself to a single medium, Suzanne’s textiles are assembled following four processes: “The foundation layer is Batik on 100% Habotai silk, which is then backed with felt. Applying liquid wax provides a barrier for the silk paints and creates a pattern once the wax is removed using a hot iron. Free machine embroidery is then stitched onto the Batik background to suggest the outline of the flowers and to offer further definition. Then dissolvable fabric work is applied in places on top as a third layer. To achieve this, machine stitch is applied to dissolvable fabric that is then immersed into boiling water. The boiling water dissolves the fabric and you are left with the embroidered lace like structures which are then tacked onto the machine stitched Batik base.”
Working from life, Suzanne’s paintings of floral arrangements using cut flowers also rely on combining a variety of media and intuitive techniques: “The two vases of flowers are seasonal flowers painted using a watercolour base with the addition of watercolour pencil, graphite and chalk pastel on top. A broad range of mark making and surface pattern techniques are also used to achieve different effects before adding rock & table salts on damp ink-based watercolour to create the textured vases.”
Suzanne’s landscapes are similarly rich in their composition that she puts down to her textile background. Built up using gouache and oil pastel applied over a watercolour base, wax crayon and oil pastel are further applied onto some of the tree trunks in order to resist the paint before decorating with ‘sgraffito’ to enhance the final texture.
Certainly not one to be missed, Suzanne’s solo exhibition will be on show at the ArtHouse, Eastbank Street, Southport from 29th October – 16th November 2024. The gallery is open Tuesday – Friday 10.00-15.00. Saturday 11.00-16.00.