Barrage Balloon Painting

"I am interested in the act of seeing; how a painting can fix our attention, evoke memory and reveal things we wouldn't otherwise see.” Susan Hamer is an artist based in East Sussex. She paints mainly in oil on small, intimate scale works that require close inspection. Her paintings seem to exist in an otherworldly space where time and sound appear suspended. People are notably absent from the work but a human presence is felt by the elements within the paintings; these range from wartime relics and ancient stone monuments to garden paddling pools. Influenced by filmic imagery, she uses many of the techniques found in photography and cinema, such as close-up, cropping and framing to create a more fragmented composition. Many of the pool paintings for example, are framed close-up and cropped, detaching and abstracting the subject matter. Others, like those from the Memento series are framed as though seen through a long lens, leaving the subject matter frustratingly distant and unknowable.