membership / artist member

Suky Best

http://www.sukybest.com
download cv here

biography

Suky Best was featured in Contemporary Art Society's ARTfutures 2007 at Bloomberg SPACE.

statement

I have a diverse practice both in terms of media and subject. The core of my work is storytelling and the visual depiction and unfolding of narrative over time. Recent bodies of work have used societies relationship to the natural world and have revisited ideas around gender politics looking at masculinity via the cowboy film. Increasingly my work has been animation; either fully representational with animated interventions or abstractions of three-dimensional space.

My working method is dependant on content and work to be made. I have made embroidered pieces, installations and published books. I try to let the subject dictate the form of the work and respond intuitively to specific places and opportunities. I also have a collaborative practice with artist Rory Hamilton.

Recent commissions:
Early Birds combines both my interest in the natural world and the deconstruction of space, using footage from the RSPB archive, the film shows silhouettes of birds against flat colour representing the approaching dawn. The sound track has interviews of retired people talking of their memories of the dawn chorus and how it contrasts with that of today, combined with recent dawn chorus recordings and library bird song.

Stone Voices is a collection of texts cut into stone from real and imagined stories and events that have taken place in the Devils Glen, Ashford, Co. Wicklow, Ireland. The textual inspiration for the collection was sourced mainly onsite from people who use the glen on a regular basis. Written in the present tense the stories are intended to be always happening. They are like ghosts, living and relating to their own time however, also accompanying you as you walk through and around the glen. The texts are deliberately ambiguous to suggest several interpretations.

The Return of the Native is a series of short digital animations that 'reintroduces' formerly indigenous insect and bird life to the contemporary agricultural landscape of the East Anglian Fenland. Using long dead specimens from the Natural History collection at Bedford County Museum, insects are re animated and digitally returned to the contemporary and hostile landscape. The slightly studied and stylised nature of each composition, in which the respective elements somehow don't quite fit together, eliciting a haunting and disquieting sense of loss.