Sue Hartga

In my heart my home is the Breckland of East Anglia and it’s  had a profound effect, which continues to this day, on both my Art practice and on my career in Education.

The Breckland is an ancient prehistoric land full of suspicion and fear of incomers mainly set in Norfolk with borders and intrusions into Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, a wide open but claustrophobic landscape through which the A11 now threads its way between London and Norwich.  There is repression and things hidden from view; A threatening landscape.  As a main coaching route, travellers were likely to be robbed during this part of their journey and travellers preferred to avoid this area or race through it.  However, growing up in a man-made forest and a landscape used by travellers over thousands of years, walking on routes which others have trod was and is a profound thrill and has added to my sense of being embedded in an environment. It led me to be fascinated by and curious about how people see themselves – the spirit of place; the influence it has on its people, tapping into the primitive sensuality of memory.

Although set on a creative pathway in Textiles and Fashion, during my Foundation Year my interest turned towards Fine Art. The breadth of expression possible appealed to me with drawing first and foremost. I specialised in Ceramic Sculpture and Glass with Landscape Studies at Exeter with Lawson Rudge and Brian Southwell. The interdisciplinary ethos there turned out to be an excellent fit and the theme throughout my working life.

This background has led me to work with ideas of being an outsider of living on the borders (and living in Royston I am still in borderland). Furthermore, early on in my teaching career my eyes were opened to individuals we now call ‘neurodivergent’(Dyslexic, DCD Dyspraxic, Autistic, ADHD in the main). Drawn in, I have always worked with young people and adults who carry a disadvantage, who have been ‘othered’ and forced to live on the edge of society. These learning experiences have led me to playing with ideas of separateness and connectedness, layering, similarity and difference, pattern and texture in the environment and glimpses of things partly seen.  This has manifested itself more recently in work to do with elements and surfaces.

Now in my Art practice, I use digital photography as a medium to represent and explore ideas offering the opportunity to work with a flexible, accessible, immediate image, a sketchbook which can be used straight away or developed through drawing, printmaking and painting, moved on and translated into something else. Although currently I am a printmaker, photographer and mixed media artist, my heart still lies in three dimensions.