I am a contemporary painter and printmaker who also creates assemblages. My practice celebrates a timeline of interests within a rich diversity of style, subject and scale from tiny pieces to immense works. Central is an exploration of the ways in which the interplay of colour, form and mark affects our mood.
Paintings translate the energy and feeling of potent emotional experiences: a storm, a memory, a place, a piece of music… Using a personal iconography, recent work captures particular mindsets and the interdependence of opposites: sorrow and joy, freedom and restraint… As Kahil Gibran states: ‘Your joy is your sorrow unmasked’.
Each new series begins intuitively, in a moment of presence. An upswell of feeling is followed by an impulse to reach for a particular colour and the first mark is made. Mark-making responds to feeling as dance to music. As the work evolves, a conscious dialogue emerges.
The assemblages reframe our view of the ordinary and overlooked by repurposing and recontextualising everyday construction materials, throwaway packaging, fragments of earlier prints and paintings. In the light of new understandings, we shift our perception of past experience. Cutting up and reassembling my own artwork, evolving something new from the existing, is a physical reminder of a psychological process of self transformation
I invite you to immerse yourself in colour, its capacity to excite the eye, engage the heart and awaken the soul.
Bio
Since her first solo exhibition in Manchester, (1995) Suzanne Bethell has exhibited widely in the UK. Her solo exhibition, Lucky Dip, launched at HOME, Manchester (2022) and was followed by solo exhibitions Playground1 (2023) and Playground 11 (2024) in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Sensing Colour was shown at the Penwith Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall (2025).
Selected group exhibitions include the Royal Scottish Academy (2018), the Royal West England Academy (2020), the Royal Cambrian Academy (2022), Saul Hay gallery, Manchester (2020,21,22,23), Porthminster Gallery, St Ives (2019-2020), Hepworth Print fair (2019,2022) and Manchester Art fair with Hotbed Press (2019,20,24). She was shortlisted for the Flourish national printmaking award (2020), was a finalist with Untitled Assemblage at HOME (2021). A print of her painting Moment of Balance is available at the Whitworth Art gallery. San Carlo restaurants is a collector.
She has made art ever since she can remember and alongside being a mum and a career in Teacher Education and Training in FE. Taking a sabbatical in 2000, she gained a Foundation in Art & Design (distinction). Since 2012 she has devoted herself full-time to her art practice.
Suzanne is an associate member of Castlefield Art gallery, Manchester and Hotbed Press, Salford.
She works from her light filled studio in a former cotton mill in Marple, overlooking the Manchester skyline.