Susan Cross’ career and exhibition history leads, with admirable directness, from her graduations from Herefordshire College of Art and Design and Middlesex Polytechnic in the early 1980s, via shows, solo and as part of a group, in places as far apart as Edinburgh, San Francisco, Kyoto, and Auckland among others, to the award of the Jerwood Prize in 2007, and her Readership at Edinburgh College of Art in 2008. Her work is in several public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Museums of Scotland.
This exhibition is Susan's fourth solo show here at The Scottish Gallery. It gives us a fascinating opportunity to see the development of her work through her persistent learning and discovery process. In this exhibition we can see the work advance from Susan's early wire-textile forms to the experiments with enamel currently in hand, and see how they speak to each other and to us.
“Drawing and collage underpin my creative activity as a jeweller. I handle materials intuitively; this fuels the development of ideas, often in direct response to the making process. Silver is oxidised black, likening it to the drawn graphite or inky line. Linear structure, texture and transparency are all qualities with which I am fascinated.” - Susan Cross