Sue  Fox

Artist Statement      Resume      Image Thumbnails      Printable Version

Artist Statement

I am pre-occupied with all things visceral and temporal. I explore such themes as birth, gender, sexuality, illness, decay, death and beyond! My works meditate on decay, fragmentation, loss, mortality and ageing. I love to photograph the realities and the fears of life and create images that confront disturbing and bizarre taboos. I am an artist who is constantly learning and striving for more insight into understanding life in all its many formations. I wish for my work to be like a mirror, reflecting back a secret inner knowing.

I try to create art that is original and unusual. I worked for over four years (1993-1997) unfunded, documenting post mortems in Manchester and created an underground book entitled 'Post Mortem', that is akin to a meditation practise and contemplation upon impermenance and reality. I have appeared in six major television programmes (including the Channel 4 series on contemporary photographers covering taboo issues. Artists included were Joel-Peter Witkin, Andres Serrano, Sally Mann, Nick Wapplington, and Jenny Saville).

I spent a year photographing two Dominatrixes in their Manchester dungeon. This was a harrowing but insightful experience. I buried my head in sex therapy manuals and psychological evaluations on the subject. I asked clients to fill in an intimate questionnaire and interviewed them. The Madams gave me lots of literature that their sex slaves had sent to them over the years, including hypnosis scripts and offers of endless and egoless servitude in exchange for being tortured, humiliated and spat upon. These images aren't pretty but capture the essence of the world of Sado-Masochism and the binds between Mistress and Slave.

In 2004 I worked on a commission from N.E.S.T.A. at Manchester Museum called 'Face Your Flesh'. It was a project that was a way of bringing in the 'personal' to the Museum through art, which engaged the public in a different manner to artefacts stuck in pristine cases. I was exploring the 'Science for Life' section which housed models and charts about diseases but which had nothing humane in it as a portrayal of disease. I advertised for people who were ill or recovering to come forward to be photographed. Nothing. I got little response for a long while and then subtly started to notice people around me who I had some connection with in the neighbourhood who wanted to talk and be portrayed. All around me I found diseases and people who'd been operated upon or had disfigurement or an invisible illness to the naked eye. Again my quest into 'the body' continued.

My friend and assistant Rebecca Scott-Bray (a criminologist) and I wrote to each other for three years and produced a lecture on Post Mortem Photography and Pathology. Rebecca gave the paper at the Australian Centre of Photography in Sydney, 2000. The talk was part of an exhibition, entitled 'The Liminal Body', and held at the time of the Sydney Olympics. The show looked at the reality and transiency of the body as opposed to the 'perfect, finite, Olympian' physical ideal.

Artist Statement      Resume      Image Thumbnails      Printable Version