Sue Arrowsmith's work has long been rooted in the formal qualities of abstraction and temporality, refracted throught the natural worls. However, in her new body of work there's another force at play. Her source material remains photographic - images she has taken of tree forms and leaf clusters, branches of blossom and weeping willows - but now she is allowing the connection between photograph and painted translation to be far freer as she strives to capture the essesnce of form and not just it's outline. These painting's are like haikus to the world she observes on regular walks, whether in London - where she lives and works - or further afield. The tension between abstract form and nature in her work remains taut as a bow string but the work's presence has been enriched byt her growing belief in innate expression and her more experimental approach to materiality.
Increasingly, Arrowsmith has been drawn to paint in metallic ink. She prepares the ink herself creating small pools of liquid gold and bronze by dilligently grinding sticks of Japanese sumi ink.
Her ongoing experimentation with materiality has allowed her to develop a way to turn solid metal into a malleable and fluid material (rather than relying on the traditional wafer-thin sheets of gold leaf). She brings out its mercurial nature and it's earthiness.
Taken from a written piece 'The colour of dawn' by Charlotte Mullins following a studio visit in early 2018