Susan Graves

Susan is currently undertaking a Post Graduate MA course in Collaborative Practices in the Creative Industries. This course is situated within the reading of the new cultural economny and the professional working practices of creative practitioners. It is designed to enable creative practitioners to research and develop a practice that is innovative, flexible and tailored to the specific professional and business development of contemporary society.

Susan is an Artist with a wide repertoire of graphic skills in the abstract/surrealistic style. Skills spanning; graphic design; website design, fashion, textiles, fine art, photography, building databases as well as using the computer as a digital laboratory. An extensive library of images is available, commissions have been undertaken to customer’s exact print/web-ready specification, including colour-scheme matching if required.

Susan studied Design in Nottingham on a two year foundation course and then on to Derby University to study Fashion Design, relevant skills were developed to enable me to produce images, movies and workshops which allow people to interact with all forms of my art. The end result is a considered and well thought out process of elimination to produce each image, movie or workshop. The unique culmination of several different techniques and formulae produce an image, movie or workshop that is genuinely original, individual and unique.

Looking at organic form and shape, Susan explores these areas using new technology in the new digital age. These peices have a life of their own and also have a story to tell in the form of a narrative. They have both alien and terrestrial elements which are Intrinsically part of the image as a whole. These abstract and beautiful images seem strangely familiar, with parts of these images depicting the simple things in life. This is what attracts Susan to them, something which can not be nailed down and is ever changing, evolving and challenging her artistic nature............

The purpose of this project is to explore the possibilities offered by modern fast computers to represent complex mathmatical iterations in graphic form – “fractals”. The fractals created go beyond the classic form of the Mandlebrot set, taking more obscure formulae as a starting point. From this point, burrowing deep inside the forms they generate, drawing on inspirations from other more traditional artists such as the Op-Art spectaculars of Varsarely and to some extent, the tile patterns of Escher or even the tessellations of Islamic culture.

Fractal Art as an art medium which was first used approximately 15-20 years ago. The first major public display could be considered to be an article about the Mandlebrot Set published in “Scientific American” in 1985. Since then, many advances have been made, both in fractal rendering capabilities and in the understanding of fractal geometry. This paper is a statement on what Fractal Art is and what it is not.

 Milton Keynes -“Projected Images from Milton Keynes Digital Artists Show”
20th November 2003
 Broadway Cinema -“Projected Movie of Images”
(To be confirmed) 2003
 Stanton Gallery, Milton Keynes -“Milton Keynes Digital Artists Show”
29th September 2003 – 11th October 2003
 South Hill Park, Bracknell – “Projected Movie of Images”
13th October 2003 – 26th October 2003
 Nottingham Castle Museum -“Annual Open Art Exhibition 2002”
10th November 2002 – 28th November 2002
 Turtle Arts Basement Gallery - “Imperfect Furture”
22nd March 2002 – 9th April 2002
 Alley Cafe Bar - “The Fractal Project 2002”
3rd January 2002 – 15th February 2002
 Nottingham Castle Museum - “Annual Open Art Exhibition 2001”
10th November 2001 – 28th November 2001
 Turtle Arts Basement Gallery - “Fascination”
10th September 2001 – 28th September 2001