About the Artist
For Susan May drawing has always been an important means of exploration and has been the bridge leading away from a long jewellery career towards painting and printmaking. These observational drawings, whose subjects include industrial architecture, traditional fairground rides, pre-historic standing stones, and the urban environment, are subtly referenced in her paintings and collagraphic prints.
The urge to work in three dimensions is ever present; constructing original objects/plates to print with is central to Susan May’s practice. The materials are sometimes found by chance although more often it will mean searching, exploring, trying out and testing. She makes the plates from some unlikely materials, combining her jewellery-making skills with an intuitive experimental approach. The ‘plates’ sometimes pass through the press several times in order to produce layers and embossings into the surface of the print – frequently going to the limit of what is possible before the paper collapses. This way of working means that each print is an individual, unique ‘one off’.
Susan May studied jewellery at Hornsey College of Art (now Middlesex University) graduating in 1976. She worked as a studio jeweller (and sometime blacksmith); her pieces have been exhibited and collected worldwide. Around 2008 she began making a gradual transition to drawing, painting and printmaking.