Ways of Seeing | Sue Mackay
"My practice explores the intersection of control and spontaneity where materials drive process. Working with paint, translucent substrates, and surface treatments, I allow process and material behavior to guide each composition. Through layering, removal, and reapplication, the work becomes a negotiation between intention and chance, producing tensions between structure and fluidity.
Informed by my research into perception, materiality, and light, the work investigates how transparency, opacity, and illumination can impact seeing. I work on and through layered surfaces and blur distinctions between surface and depth, gesture and atmosphere, creating shifting visual fields that resist singular interpretation.
Light functions as both material and conceptual agent, activating the work and emphasizing its temporal and perceptual variability. These paintings invite a sensory engagement, where viewers encounter forms that oscillate between the familiar and the indeterminate, foregrounding experience over representation."
Instagram: @sue_j_mackay
