Changing Sisters

Envisage a modern-day protagonist, a time-travelling, shapeshifting being. A contemporary heroine, who challenges the gatekeepers and protects women and their rights. A present-day goddess, conceiving creative strategies that challenge the patriarchal power structures.

These figures are prevalent in Siusan Patterson’s work, sometimes assisted by other companions: animal, human, or hybrid. The artist has created, via this complex creature and her allies, an ethereal reality where life can be wildly reimagined with alternative narratives to those that we experience in today’s world.
Weaving the narratives from myths and legends together with historical art references, Siusan interrogates how society expresses and influences cultural attitudes about contemporary women and marginalised figures. She highlights how women are impacted by societal gatekeeping and excluded from, or policed, by the broader community to which they belong, or from claiming and expressing their own identity.

Her work is an exuberant, at times humorous take on female narratives using multiple flat layers of paint to generate bold figurative paintings in bright colours with flourishes of pattern and textiles that create a sense of visibility and empowerment.