Sue Lawty

Artist in residence, Stockholm, 22 November 2023 – 25 February 2024

Sue Lawty is a British artist and designer who constructs works from raphia, hemp and lead, and makes drawings and assemblages using tiny stones, creating a kind of pixelated cloth. The work is slow, thoughtful, and meticulous. Defined as much by absence as presence, it quietly draws the viewer in to notice almost imperceptible differences. First-hand involvement in landscape – running and walking in remote and rocky terrain – is central to her work. Anchored in an emotional, spiritual and physical engagement with the land, her pieces have been described as ‘spiritual… meditative… a deeply contemplative experience’.

Photo: Hans Henning Pedersen

Sue Lawty

Lawty will develop her drawing and weaving practice during the IASPIS residency. She intends to explore the Scandinavian winter landscape and light, including the Stockholm archipelago, while being open and alert to the important opportunity for focus and experimentation the residency affords.

In 1976 Lawty received a First-Class honours degree in three-dimensional design from Leeds. Her work is in collections worldwide including the Jack Lenor Larsen collection at LongHouse Reserve, New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London where she held a year-long solo exhibition, Concealed-Discovered-Revealed. She continued to be Artist in Residence/Associate Artist with the V&A from 2005–2010, during which she devised the acclaimed global online community art project ‘World Beach Project’. In 2013/14 she held a prestigious Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC and the National Design Museum in New York. The book Earth Materials was published about her work in 2017. Lawty is also an accomplished trekker and leads both hard mountain treks and specialist textile walking trips to India, Nepal and Bhutan.