Sue Blandford -Magic in the Everyday
1st September to 22nd October 2010
Sue is interested in poetic juxtapositions of objects, which are imbued with both their practical uses and their symbolic evocation. The magic in the seemingly mundane or everyday. Her concern lies with paradoxes of light and dark, peace and unease, also relationships between manmade objects or interventions in natural situations.
Sue Blandford: Artist Statement
“I never go anywhere without a camera looking for photographs in their own right but mainly for material for paintings. Objects in context but slightly out of place. I am interested in what happens in the golden 20 minutes in the evening when the light is low and transformative giving glimpses of something other. When objects glow out of dark spaces or as with glasshouses, become beacons filled with mystery and seemingly inner light.
My work is a visual diary of observations that chime with internal states or life phases. Last summer I completed a series of chair paintings that reflect a singular state, made to seat one, suggestive of a recent but departed presence. The chairs were abandoned in the street, battered and worn but wonderfully patinated with their history, in a new context that frame their tired beauty.
My winter series was inspired by photographs taken on my allotment which embrace the seemingly cold, barren but necessarily dormant earth, darkly framing glowing glasshouses symbolic of the growth and potential to come.
Mirror Boat II has sprung a leak and is over shadowed but this enables it to carry bright reflections of the sky from the safety of its dark little harbour.
‘Waiting for the thaw’ depicts a fragile white chair glowing in the yellowy light of dormant energy encased in an icy glasshouse below a deadening slate sky. I aspire to work with things that seem difficult but if embraced prove necessary and helpful such as the hibernation of winter in the spirit of optimism. “
Sue Blandford has been working as a professional artist exhibiting nationally and internationally since graduating From Norwich Art School with B.A. hons in fine art in 1991 undertaking numerous painting, sculpture and design commissions including private collections, Paduk, The Victoria & Albert Museum and Knebworth House restoration. She has undertaken artists residencies, taught arts workshops and reviewed for London Arts Board for dance and theatre.