Gallery 1

Susie Freeman: WOWI+

A Retrospective of work by Susie Freeman
including Pharmacopoeia with Dr Liz Lee

Susie established herself as a textile artist of great originality early in her career. As a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art, following Manchester School of Art where she had studied weaving, she invented a knitted network of pockets using a monofilament thread: into each small transparent pocket she dropped a tiny object before safely sealing them with a further row of knitting, and repeating this to construct the cloth. At the same time Susie explored different ways of using and showing these works by fashioning cowls, scarves and jackets. These wearable garments were very distinctive, selling at Chelsea Craft Fair and in galleries – and attracting an admiring, loyal following.

As her children grew up her strong ethical concerns for society found a voice through her friendship with Dr Liz Lee. Together they started to question our increasing dependence on medicines and Susie began to imagine how their ideas could be visualised through her work. Taking the name ‘Pharmacopoeia’ their collaboration used innovative artistic imagery to question social concerns around health. …..with the scale of the work escaping the confines of the tiny pockets. Huge suits of armour and flowing garments, constructed from metallic pill packets, describe the issues that the work addresses; issues which become more vital each day.

Curated by Mary La Trobe-Bateman
In association with the Royal College of General Practitioners