about suzette clough

This year I am celebrating 54 years of painting. It is not an exaggeration to say that painting has saved my life. It has been the most consistent practice of my adult life. Painting has held me, nourished me, brought me into a spiritual home - it has taught me how to tune into a coherent inner voice which continues to be my guide.

I originally trained in painting at Sydney College of the Arts - in Australia, the country of my birth. Whilst at art school I had a breakdown which guided the next decades of my life culminating in a move to London in 1985, and training as a somatic psychotherapist at the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy. This was a radical and life changing 5-year training in embodied psychotherapy. As well as an intensive hands-on practitioner training I entered into a long term psychoanalytic therapy.

As a psychotherapist I have worked in a psychiatric hospital running art therapy groups, also as a 12-step addiction counsellor using art-making with clients with eating disorders and other addictions. I have worked at London Lighthouse, a radical hospice for people with HIV and AIDS, alongside various healing projects where I have used Visual Medicine with women who have experience of the criminal justice system and those with mental health issues stemming from the pernicious effects of patriarchy on our collective nervous system.

Retrospectively, I see my breakdown as a seering initiation. The impact of this unravelling has rigorously guided me through hands-on my inner research and work with clients and students. As Leonard Cohen via Rumi so deftly suggests - the crack is how the light gets in…for everyone.

Giving visual shape and conceptual form to Visual Medicine continues to be both a life-affirming, and life-defining experience for me. My practice as an artist is about learning the language of the material world and how our world not only speaks to us through materiality, but how it wants to speak to us - co-creatively, oracularly and communicatively. The continuing evolution of Visual Medicine is a vibrant collaboration between some amazing students and clients, my own creativity, the Ancestors, the Unseen, the Invisible Ones, the Creation Devas, and the loving fields of Original Pattern Ancestor Beings that surround us.

Acknowledgements 

No one creates in a vacuum.

Some of the most important teachers and influences that flow through my work live, and have lived in my daily life. My mother Sally Clough - a fierce and deeply unconventional role model who allowed the Divine to inhabit the mess. Mrs Priscilla Eve  - my high school art teacher and Mrs Myrtle Dunlop  - my English teacher - both of whom were passionate advocates for the centrality of women and girl’s creativity. The Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy in London - the directors - Bernd Eiden and Jochen Lude, trailblazers in the techniques of how to unfold the wisdom of the psyche and the body through hands-on experience  - and for the many lifelong friendships and loves that blossomed from the eyrie of the Chiron Centre. My long-long term psychotherapist Alexandra Karan, who held my hand and my broken head until I could find my feet and my mind.

My son Finn who walks the path of his own creativity in his utterly unique way, my step-daughter Ella who swims in the waters of creativity and social activism. Being a parent is the most rigorous training for the exquisite work of honouring another soul’s innate creativity.

I honour my ongoing and deepening collaboration with the Dead - my darling friend Marianna Alexander, Louis Alexander, Jon Greenberg, John + Stuart Clough and many loved ones who have left. My own blood kin Ancestors, the Grandmothers, Grandfathers, the Land Ancestors, the Unseen, the Creation Devas - these Beings include Plants, Animals, Minerals, Light + Water + Fire. I acknowledge the myriad Beings who live amongst us as unseen bodhisattvas passing wisdom, help and love through the veil so that we can know we are never alone.

For over 35 years, my work and love have been intricately woven together and co-mingled with Shoshi Asheri my co-creative catalyst, soul-artist partner without whom my life and work would be infinitely less in every imaginable way. She reweaves my world each day of our lives together.