Four Wards

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

This work is part of a series that was painted throughout the Covid-19 pandemic on materials found by the artist, such as cardboard from dismantled delivery boxes. They have their origin in photographs taken in UK hospital wards by a consultant hepatologist and art collector friend of the artist. Hamilton found these haunting visions of doctors and nurses clad in protective suits and surrounded by wires and screens, in all their strangeness, oddly inspiring. As the series grew, Hamilton combined this new subject of the pandemic with aspects of her past work – bringing in glaring neon, hovering cellular motifs, isolated human figures and a sense of mystery created by figures transformed by hoods and masks. This last aspect became particularly significant for Hamilton, allowing her to explore the Hieronymus Bosch-like enigma or threat and sci-fi unease produced by a gathering of veiled, masked, visored and hooded figures. As Hamilton describes it, she imagined the figures ‘as seen by a patient suffering from hallucinations as they loomed over the side of the bed… I wanted to paint a contrast between two worlds, with the figures of strange or spectral doctors juxtaposed with the ordinary setting of the hospital bed. They suggest a ghostly, uncanny reality impinging on a patient who is in a borderline space between life and death, between the known and the unknown'.

Susie Hamilton is a London-based artist whose paintings explore the place of figures in the wilderness, both literal (the Arctic) and metaphorical (an urban superstore). She studied painting at Central Saint Martins and Byam Shaw School of Art. Since 2018, she has been commissioned by arts and mental health charity Hospital Rooms to paint murals in psychiatric intensive care units and, in 2022, made three paintings for the central staircase of the new Springfield University Hospital in Tooting, London. She has exhibited widely in recent years, in the UK and internationally. Her works referencing the Covid-19 pandemic have been acquired by the British Museum, the Science Museum and Imperial College.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Susie Hamilton (1950 - )

Title

Four Wards

Date

2020 - 2021

Medium

Acrylic, Pastel, Charcoal on Cardboard, Paper and Board

Dimensions

height 22cm; width 32cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist, December 2023

Provenance

Susie Hamilton, London UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection 20 December 2023

GAC number

19253