Sue Parr's practice considers how art rituals can develop bonds of kinship and care across species through differing modes of exchange.

 

By expanding small daily practices of self-care outwards to incorporate the non-human, a sense of kinship and reciprocity is considered as our porous boundaries are mapped via the lines between living and dying.

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Sue has have recently completed a BA (Hons) in Painting through the University of the Arts (OCA) and her practice has moved into the expanded field which now also incorporates printmaking, textiles and moving image.

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Working through digital media as well as with plant, earth and body matter, the work visualises the body as extended, entangled, mediated and in a state of constant transience through its relationships within the more-than-human world.

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The resulting relics enact their own histories and stories, and operate in a hybrid space combining the graphic, mechanical and technological, with the organic and temporal life processes.

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Sue is particularly interested in making contact with the overlooked and unseen, and her most recent body of work focuses on celebrating the relationships between plants and humans, with a specific focus on stinging nettles.

 

The work honours our relationships with these often-overlooked plants, considering all the gifts they have bestowed us over millennia, as well as our shared attributes. Our bodies are fibrous, pigmented, porous and leaky. We respire, expire, digest and decay together, leaving many traces.  

 

Through slow making and intimate ritual encounters, the work brings the human body back in touch with the nettle’s, in an attempt to repair and restore bonds of care and to promote mutual well-being and healing.

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