Susie Liddle 

I originally trained as a primary school teacher studying art as a main subject and after marrying moved to Wales and worked for many years as a supply teacher in primary and secondary schools often to my great delight working in art departments. Throughout my time teaching and afterwards when I had left to set up my own business, I continued to go on art courses to satisfy my love of art. After my family had grown up I was at last able to go to art school. Two years later I was the proud holder of an FdA in art and design and then went on to study part time for a further two years in order to obtain a Professional Printmaking Diploma. Since 2008 I have worked as a professional artist and my practice whilst constantly evolving continues to have the same thread running through which comes from my fascination with both everyday life and early photographic methods.

Eager to expand my skills, I travelled to Seattle In 2016, 2017 and 2018 to spend a week at Encausticamp run by renowned encaustic artist Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch. There I have met and worked with a wonderful and highly talented group of American and Canadian encaustic artists and discovered, thanks to their skill and generosity, just how many ways encaustic can be and is used today. I have also travelled to Kansas City to study with printmaker and encaustic artist Jeff Hirst and Ireland to study with renowned artists Lora Murphy and Kathryn Bevier.

My creative journey with encaustic continues and I was honoured to be awarded the Winners Prize at The Royal Cambrian Academy Open Exhibition 2017 for my encaustic mixed media painting ‘Hopes and Dreams’.

Artist’s Statement

My creative journey with encaustic continues and I was honoured to be awarded the Winners Prize at The Royal Cambrian Academy Open Exhibition 2017 for my encaustic mixed media painting ‘Hopes and Dreams’.

As a practising printmaker and mixed media artist, my work has always been a reflection of time and memory, sometimes real but often imaginary. People and the minutiae of daily life and my surroundings are a constant source of fascination to me. A face glimpsed in passing or a snippet of conversation overheard provides only the merest hint at lives being played out. What secrets lie behind the respectable facades that line our streets? What skeletons lurk in family closets or adventures visit these people in their dreams? Old photographs try to tell me their stories and though those who look back at me may have gone long ago their images remain frozen in time. I often use the cyanotype process invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel to reproduce these vintage photographic images as a basis for my pictures. I feel that using a historical photographic process creates a connection between the past and present which is important to me. As the image slowly emerges on the paper I gaze into the eyes of the person appearing before me and wonder what sort of lives they led. I shall never know but I can travel a little way with them in my imagination creating contemporary art from things from the past.

 It was whilst exploring ways to create a physical timeline in my work that I came across encaustic wax an even older process dating back to Ancient Greece and Egypt and started to incorporate this into my work applying many transparent and coloured layers of wax to a board on which I can then embed images, draw, scrape, carve etcetera. Working on the board in this way and then covering with successive layers serves to create the visual depth that I had long been seeking.. I discovered that encaustic blended perfectly with my earlier work as a printmaker and knew that this was going to be a long relationship