Landed
Landed
Sue Shields
The artist
Sue Shields is a painter and print maker and studied at Manchester and Brighton schools of art. She is a keen walker and explorer searching for all that is local, marginal and obscure. She teaches, holds workshops and is a member of the artist led group View5, currently artists in residence to the Langdyke Countryside Trust as well as co-chair of Creative Peterborough. Sue exhibits her work nationally and has lived in central Peterborough for 14 years.
The work
Sue Shields new work explores her life long relationship with both landscape and nature. Her paintings, prints, textiles and curios are a response to her belief that our increasing concern for the natural environment and our worship, care and reverence of it has transcended the bounds of scientific and recreational norms, being replaced instead by behaviours akin to the devotion shown to established religions. Sue pays homage to this philosophy and by drawing on historical religious devices has created devotional artefacts and totems inventing a symbolic faith, the Cult of Land in contrast to the theological and conceptual doctrine of the church.
Historically landscape and wildlife have been an inspiration to artists, and their response, as well as celebrating the natural aesthetic, has often portrayed it as an idyll, saving us from the contamination of our over developed towns and cities, their mass population and pollution. Our current environmental concerns for the land and all that is contained within it fuels the desire to save what is most precious and reinforces the belief that the countryside is essential to our well being; forays in to it resembling one seeking solace and salvation countering the alarm of human ‘civilisation’ and the increasing demands on the natural world.
Sue invites you to join her on a personal journey into the promised land; harsh with the realities of nature and environmental pressure, encountering natures prophets, saints and martyrs. A pilgrimage to a land full of wonder struggling for survival; but ultimately sacred and beautiful.
