professional practice

 Suzanne Golden  

Suzanne Golden is an artist and co-director and Backlit studio. Her early artistic studies began at St Helens art college in Mersyside, here she had the quite exciting opportunity of working with Anthony Gromly at just the age of 17. Then studying Fine art at the Leeds Met University. She mentioned that like many when she left university she didn't really know what to do or where to go, she had a few small jobs like call centres until moving to London in 1998. When in London she found herself in many art administrator jobs even working in a prestigious London auction house. Suzanne did mention that this was a great opportunity for her but helped her realise what she didn't want from her creative world as she felt like she didn't quite fit in. She became part of the London arts council and did many different jobs in galleries and curating in places like the cell project space and hackney until leaving the arts council to go travelling for a while. She moved down to Nottingham in 2014 with her family and children and started a job at the Backlit studios and the Foyle foundation. This is were she really got back into here artistic practice, she mentioned to begin with she began with illustrations and graphics but kept them private for a while until an exhibition shared exhibition at Backlit called share bears in June 2021. From there she kept creating and sharing work and really getting into the mediums of paper cutting and manipulating images. Suzanne describes herself as a visual storyteller, working with themes of mental health, appearance and equality. She received the developing your practice grant and is currently working and developing a project called Skin deep, a project exploring themes of eczema and its impact on mental health, using her own and other peoples experiences. 

I found Suzanne's talk to be inciteful, i like the way that even though she'd taken time away from her artistic practice she still managed to keep herself in the artistic world through her jobs and such. Before her talk i wasn't really aware of how many non physically creative but still artistic jobs are out there.