In Susie Hamilton's paintings abstraction is never allowed to take over completely. She wants her paintings to be a hinge between figurative and non-figurative art in order to show the world of familiarity tipping over into the unfamiliar and inexplicable. She wants to reach a tipping point where the recognizable world of representation has given way to unnamed, abstract shapes that still, however, contain traces of their figurative origins. The "sensation", as Francis Bacon said of his painting, "slowly leaks back into the fact". Before finding out what an object is, there is the sensation of an obscure but intriguing presence, some visual force that reminds the viewer of something as yet unlabelled. It is about two contrasting ways of seeing the world—in terms of familiar names or of unfamiliar, nameless shapes and an attempt to get behind the familiar to rediscover a sense of mystery.
