Leisure

Susie Hamilton

Leisure 1 (beaches)

The beach scene at the end of H.G.Wells' The Time Machine was a starting point for the lurid sky/light in this series of paintings which show figures pushed to the dystopian edge of dirty, overcrowded sand. The brochure image of paradise is turned into a futuristic, apocalyptic scene of mutating, dissolving figures set against an ominous backdrop in which the invisible, microscopic cell has been enlarged to hang there with virulent design.

Leisure 2 (dining rooms)

Diners are going to pieces within the banquet's orderly structure. Cells and biological metamorphosis as well as the darkness of deep space and bursts of radiation overwhelm figures who are melting into fluid and reduced to blots and smears and signs. Messy entanglements of unnameable shapes suggest social confusion and the representation of what cannot be articulated in such encounters.

Leisure3

Figures are isolated in an envelope of flat colour. This forms a pod or chrysalis in which kinds of mutation occur and the figure is not in control of its own borders. In contrast to the bland envelope that contains them, the figures are watery, unstable and metamorphic physically and emotionally. They can also seem humanoid, hybrid, fusing human and animal or human and machine.