Artist’s statement
Artwork title: Wrotan II | Artwork media: Copper | Artwork dimensions: 190 x 100 x 100 cm
Susan Meyerhoff Sharples is an international visual artist, based in North West England, UK. She is a Fellow of Wirral Art School and Bachelor of Arts with Honours first class. Her exhibitions, commissions and collections include: America, Spain, Canada, Israel, Croatia, Montenegro, Eire, France and UK.
Her work is concerned with evolutionary processes, provocative defence systems and the primal instinct for survival achieved via diversity and adaptation. She creates hybrid sculptural forms that expose a glimpse of evolutionary fantasy, suggesting relationships between ancient organisms and their modern descendants. Their ambiguity reflects cultural, social and environmental concerns. Viewed from a playful perspective, they transform a materials utilitarian functionality into mythical forms linking prehistoric with futuristic.
Blurring boundaries between the organic and constructed world, her two dimensional work, inspired by human interference with the natural order of things, scratches the surface of nature- both human and organic to reveal the complexities of human perception. Informed by her skills in multi-media artwork her paintings and prints often have a sense of opacity, hinting at things hidden beneath deceptively simple representations of natural forms. They relate to her physical and emotional experience of location, social and industrial histories and events of place.