Jan Patience: How this artist creates beautiful works with cut out paper

It’s always exciting when an artist you admire makes inroads into a new way of making work.

Sue Barclay won the now-defunct Aspect Painting Prize in 2005 for a series of large paintings of swimmers underwater. The models for the swimmers were her now-grown-up children, Gabby and Matteo, then in their teens.

Sue took a break from art for five years, and her calm yet fizzily creative spirit has been much missed.

The Glasgow-based painter, a qualified yoga teacher and Alexander Technique instructor, has long been fascinated by primordial symbols, like moons, suns and tiny fishes. All these motifs find their way into her new paintings.

I’m lucky enough to own a couple of tiny oil paintings from a decade ago. One has a male figure suspended in a mid-air foetal position. The other has a fish swimming in a sea of red, a circle above its body.

Last year, the combination of lockdown and a house move that provided a studio space, gave Sue the push to feel her way back to art.

© SYSTEM

She began painting on individual sheets of paper and worked on them until each sheet was transformed. After leaving the paper for days, weeks and sometimes months, she began cutting freehand with scissors. With the shapes lying on her studio floor, she assembled them into standalone artworks.

The result is One World; a series of stripped-back acrylic paintings. Alongside the paintings, she created a collection of collaged and painted wooden bangles. One World will go on show this Friday at Nicolls in Partick, Glasgow, until November 24.

Sue’s daughter, Gabby Biazotti, who gained a music degree from Goldsmiths University in London, has created a brand-new “soundscape” in response to the One World series. Gabby’s Call To Ritual, featuring sound and pictures, will be shown on Saturday and Sunday in the gallery.

The Lemond Gallery in Bearsden has links with leading Scottish artists and its Christmas exhibition, which opened yesterday, features more than 600 paintings by 100 artists.

The exhibition has a series of Cop26-inspired submissions, including one from journalist-turned-painter Sandra Ratcliffe – Energy Transition Rays Of Hope – based on a recent view from her window.

“I see big skies often here on the Ayrshire coast,” she says, “but none so powerful as that. Earth will survive, but we need to act now to give future generations hope.”