Suzanne Holtom
Weltlandschaft – Reimagining Landscape
My recent paintings attempt to re-imagine ideas of landscapes, a subject in painting which, for me is able to draw from a rich tradition in painting whilst having such significance today. These landscapes also evoke bodily forms and histories of industries and patterns of energy. The idea of the ‘Weltlandschaft’ is central to the structures in the paintings, as the viewpoint is often bird-like, encompassing both height and distance and vast stretches of space and time. It is a landscape that points between something done here and forgotten there. Time in this sense can be deep geological time and a terrain bearing the scars of more recent interventions. Scale is also important, epic themes can collide with the trivial or commonplace but what is always implicated is how human activities have impacted on and interacted with the landscape.
My sources are drawn from memories, maps, art histories, cartoons and government information films. A mythic West Midlands is sometimes the setting, where I grew up; a land that often feels marginal and in-between, but was central to the industrial revolution of Britain. I sometimes draw from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and Looney Tunes, from Breughel and Rubens. But always at the forefront is the making of the paintings. This is often improvised and intuitive, each set of found concerns is worked out in the studio with a process of trial and error, as structures are tested as well as composed.
For me, these landscapes suggest the instability of experienced events, an instability which seems to point to the future.
Biography
Suzanne Holtom is an artist based in London. She studied at Cardiff, The Slade School of Fine Art and Turps Art School.
Holtom’s practice is in painting, she was included in The Jerwood Painting prize in 2003, Birth Rites, a residency and touring exhibition 2008 and has exhibited regularly in group and solo exhibitions in London and the UK. More recently, she had a solo exhibition, Fortune and Folly in Hampstead, London and group exhibitions; X at Newcastle Contemporary Art, Swamp Legends, Vitalistic Fantasies, Blink and Turps Painting shows. Suzanne has a solo exhibition of recent landscape paintings at New Art Gallery Walsall in March 2025.
