“Susie David explores water in its many forms with an enthusiasm that is as infectious as the work is captivating. Her work draws creative energy through accepting and embracing tension and uncertainty and through surrender to processes beyond her control.

In many ways David's work is a collaborative endeavour between herself and water, allowing the steam or the tides, falling rain or still waters to shape and respond to the ink she pours into it, the paper she leaves under it, the lens she points towards it. The work is as delightfully unrestrained by form as her subject matter is by use…There is a continual sense that water, frequently domesticated and controlled, is - like life - ultimately unknowable and un-containable…

While delighting in and affirming life through interaction with water, its metaphors and its poetry, the threat of the unknown and that which can never be controlled is a constant presence in David's work – an intriguing and at times intimidating unknown just beneath the surface.”

Darren Harvey-Regan

This is quiet work. Meditative. Hovering ethereal between formless and form - the liminal realm. This is an ode to the fathomless magical entity that is water. A message in a bottle for water.
Looking at any of my paintings you might almost make out something but then again… maybe not - seascape? landscape? cloudscape? aerial view? microscopic cross-section of some unidentifiable membrane? deep space? - It is of nothing, or rather, no-thing with, at times, suggestions. By ‘no-thing’ I mean the Japanese MU field of potential.
Contemplating and communing with: rain, floods, waves, spills, tears, a glass of tap water… Encounters witnessed, intertwining, reenacted. I rummage in water's liquid poetics and rifle through its wild philosophies.
I float in the sea and film …sea. Nothing but sea.
In winter’s bare aloneness I stand knee deep, seeing if the rough storm waves want to write renga with me - or any script, for me to decipher.
In the back yard, I read love poems to the stream, compile them verbatim, bind them into a book and poetry reading. The stream listens as I read it out and tell it of the oohs and ahhs of the audience who were there mainly to hear Alice Oswald. But Water - I manage to slip in with you.
You slide under the skirting boards into the gallery space. Curators put their toes in your irreverent breaking-in.
A boy smashes stone against stone on a beach. I ask him why. He says he wants to see what’s inside. I take the stones home and mend their raw brokenness using pure gold. Later I will take them back to the beach.
In the studio, lovesick, spilling wave after wave of liquid longing over linen, paper, wood to make my paintings. Lover, enveloper, of sugar, of salt, of mineral, of air, of limb, of fin, of sequin scale, of diatom’s midnight glow…
You have taken so many souls this year ocean. One of the times I was swept away, it was close. I remembered just in time - to swim oblique to the shore to escape a rip. Oblique is a good strategy water says if you want to come back to life. My work is oblique.
I draw on the well of Eastern philosophies, aesthetics and poetry - this informs my practice, resonates within my works. Teaches me how to be more …water. More fluid. Less rigid. On site and in the studio my ragged wrack-line of implements, materials, methodologies and processes are strewn about me, resulting in drawings, sculpture, films, writings, poems and ultimately, paintings...
In this website, I am showing you mainly the paintings at the moment. I may add other works soon.
Get in touch. I love getting letters from people.
Susie David

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles
and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu

“Susie David explores water in its many forms with an enthusiasm that is as infectious as the work is captivating. Her work draws creative energy through accepting and embracing tension and uncertainty and through surrender to processes beyond her control.

​While delighting in and affirming life through interaction with water, its metaphors and its poetry, the threat of the unknown and that which can never be controlled is a constant presence in David's work – an intriguing and at times intimidating unknown just beneath the surface.”

Darren Harvey-Regan

This is quiet work. Meditative. Hovering ethereal between formless and form - the liminal realm. This is an ode to the fathomless magical entity that is water. A message in a bottle for water.

Contemplating and communing with: rain, floods, waves, spills, tears, a glass of tap water… Encounters witnessed, intertwining, reenacted. I rummage in water's liquid poetics and rifle through its wild philosophies.

I float in the sea and film …sea. Nothing but sea.

In winter’s bare aloneness I stand knee deep, seeing if the rough storm waves want to write renga with me - or any script, for me to decipher.

In the back yard, I read love poems to the stream, compile them verbatim, bind them into a book and poetry reading. The stream listens as I read it out and tell it of the oohs and ahhs of the audience who were there mainly to hear Alice Oswald. But Water - I manage to slip in with you.

You slide under the skirting boards into the gallery space. Curators put their toes in your irreverent breaking-in.

A boy smashes stone against stone on a beach. I ask him why. He says he wants to see what’s inside. I take the stones home and mend their raw brokenness using pure gold. Later I will take them back to the beach.

In the studio, lovesick, spilling wave after wave of liquid longing over linen, paper, wood to make my paintings. Lover, enveloper, of sugar, of salt, of mineral, of air, of limb, of fin, of sequin scale, of diatom’s midnight glow…

You have taken so many souls this year ocean. One of the times I was swept away, it was close. I remembered just in time - to swim oblique to the shore to escape a rip. Oblique is a good strategy water says if you want to come back to life. My work is oblique.

In this website, I am showing you mainly the paintings at the moment. I may add other works soon.

Get in touch. I love getting letters from people.

Susie David

While delighting in and affirming life through interaction with water, its metaphors and its poetry, the threat of the unknown and that which can never be controlled is a constant presence in David's work – an intriguing and at times intimidating unknown just beneath the surface.”