I worked in architecture for twelve years before returning to education to study art graduating in 2002.
shortlisted:
2016 Lichfield Art Prize: Finalist
2012 John Moores Painting Prize Walker Gallery Liverpool
residency:
2015 Staithes Studios North Yorkshire
solo exhibitions:
2016 Susan Laughton The Cold Press, Holt, Norfolk
2015 Travelling Light Quercus Gallery, Bath
2011 Still Here greenroom, Manchester curated by Blank Media collective
2010 Measured Space Duckett and Jeffreys Gallery, Malton,
North Yorkshire see more
2009 Sightlines Salford Museum & Art Gallery including curation of works
from Salford’s permanent collection see more
2008 Haworth Museum & Gallery Accrington
group exhibitions:
2018 JOURNEY The Stratford Gallery
2018 Fresh: Contemporary Art Fair, Cheltenham Racecourse
2018 The Affordable Art Fair, Battersea represented by The Art Agency
2018 Winter The Stratford Gallery
2017 Mixing Signals Kobi & Teal, Frome, Somerset
2017 Gaze, Glimpse: Looking at landscape Gallery 57, Arundel
2017 Ikigai: A reason for living The Old Lock Up Gallery, Derbyshire
2017 A Time for Reflection The Stratford Gallery, Stratford upon Avon
2017 Presence Artwave West, Morecombelake, Dorset
2016 Opening Exhibition The Stratford Gallery, Stratford-upon-Avon
2016 Buy Art Fair Manchester, represented by Staithes Studios
2016 Open Exhibition The Old Station Gallery, Rowsley, Derbyshire
2016 Responses in Colour Artwave West, Morecombelake, Dorset
2016 Lichfield Art Prize: Finalist Lichfield Cathedral, Emporium Gallery
2016 A Certain Language Staithes Studios gallery, North Yorkshire
2015 Drawn 2015 The Royal West of England Academy, Bristol
2015 The Still Point Quercus Gallery, Bath
2014 Bristol Affordable Art Fair represented by Columbia Road Gallery
2014 Quercus Gallery Summer Show
2014 Hampstead Affordable Art Fair
2013 Battersea Affordable Art Fair
2013 New York City Affordable Art Fair
2013 neo:artprize exhibition neo:gallery 22, Bolton
2013 Hampstead Affordable Art Fair
2013 Palace Art Fair Fulham, London
2013 Bristol Affordable Art Fair
2012 Artlink Stockport Art Gallery, Cheshire
2011 Artificial Light Cupola Gallery, Sheffield
2011 A Different View The Barefoot Gallery, Boston Spa, Yorkshire
2011 No.1: Paint BLANKSPACE Gallery, Manchester
2011 Barnaby Festival Macclesfield
2011 Stockport Contemporary Open Stockport Art Gallery, Cheshire
2010 Palace Art Fair Fulham, London
2009 Art of Ideas II Arts & Business/Arts Council exhibition selected by
Stephen Snoddy, Director of the Walsall Gallery
2009 Findings Valley Artists at Towneley Museum & Gallery, Burnley
2009 Survey Gallerytop, Rowsley, Derbyshire
2009 Buy Art Fair Urbis, Manchester, represented by Arts&Business
2008 Brighton Art Fair
2007 Tony Scrivener & Susan Laughton Firbob & Peacock
Contemporary Art, Knutsford, Cheshire see more
2007 Brighton Art Fair
2007 Open Exhibition Grosvenor Museum, Chester
2006 Calder Gallery Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire
2006 Haworth Open Haworth Gallery, Accrington, Lancashire
2006 Landmarks III Lowood Gallery, Armathwaite, Cumbria
2005 Sculptural Possibilities Cupola Gallery, Sheffield
awards:
2006 Arts Council Grant
commissions:
2008 Valley of Stone: art commission and community workshop with five
Valley Artists for Groundwork Pennine Lancashire (with Heritage
Lottery funding) to raise awareness of the quarrying heritage of
Rossendale.
selected:
Axisweb for Artists www.axisweb.org/p/susanlaughton
Visual portfolio by Arts & Business
education:
2002 BA (Hons) Visual Art and Design (First) University of Bolton
1987 HND Building Technology Bolton Institute
studio:
Vale Artists Studios, Congleton, Cheshire 2018 - present
Electric Picture House Artists Co-operative, Congleton, Cheshire 2011 - 2017
Victoria Mill Arts Centre, Congleton, Cheshire 2010 - 2011
Valley Artists, Rossendale, Lancashire 2004 - 2010
We are constantly blasted with visual information, to the extent we may no longer look and see. Susan’s pared down landscapes bring order, balance and control to an often chaotic visual world as she observes the distant and mundane and brings to the viewer a new ordered sense of beauty.
Susan’s paintings, like the landscape she is inspired by, reach their outcome after a slow, long process of give and take, adding to and taking away.
Stef Mitchell
Artist and Curator
The work by Susan Laughton shimmers with subdued colour, elegant and restrained but captured fleeting glimpses of landscape and structure you sometimes don’t remember seeing. The combination of craftsmanship and intelligence leaves a lasting impression.
Hilary Angle
Artist
It’s not often that I insist people see something up close to appreciate its beauty, but in the case of Susan Laughton’s work, I do. The iridescence of each piece, and the sense of stillness they exude, requires more than just a jpeg. Each trace line has meaning, each tiny mark a message like some kind of artist hieroglyphics. The overall effect is incredibly calm & beautiful.
Fiona Bailey
The White Gallery
www.thewhitegallery.blogspot.com
On looking at photographic images of Drifting I, a work that appears sparse, yet up close is richly and imperfectly textured, I am reminded of a similar experience of getting caught up in the physical details an inch or so away from Agnes Martin's large format abstract works. However, unlike that subjectless painter's work, Drifting I holds open a space between the primacy of material, the quavering, scratched visual field and a barely-there narrative snapshot of what might be snowfields at dusk. Taking seriously that painterly dialectic between its function as emotive, symbolistic window-to-the-soul and as opaque, modernist object, this work's shadowed, white borders also lend it a 'polaroid' quality, hinting at an as-yet undeveloped, or perhaps lost, momentary vision.
Significantly, Laughton's titles ostensibly refer to events and objects figured in a bleak Northern landscape: drifting snow, getting lost and finding one's way, clouds, traces of journeys and storms. Yet, as attention to the physical working and reworking of her paintings reveals, these words and phrases refer as much to the process of raw materials - acrylic, gouache and plaster - dragging and 'drifting', tracing and layering right there on the canvas, as they do to any inner or outer world.
Becky Hunter
Writer and UK Editor of Whitehot magazine.
