Suzie McDaniel

suzie mcdaniel

Suzie McDaniel is a ceramic artist, her practice focuses on slip-casting and hand-built ceramic pieces, which are decorated with hand painted designs, taking inspiration from ceramicists including Daphne Christoforou, Vicky Lindo and Helen Beard. 

Suzie has a background in Finance and without formal training, started her art practice in 2018. Her first exhibition took place in October 2023 with Manchester Ceramics Collective at the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair held at Victoria Baths, Manchester. She gained exclusive access to the Bath’s archive for inspiration, creating a piece as a response to the location. 

Recently, she was one of six participants in the Studio 8 Collective residency, “Beyond the Frame”, that took place at Mura Ma Gallery, Marple in April 2024. The residency aimed to “challenge traditional ways of presenting art, revealing the process of making, discussion and experimentation usually reserved for the studio, and to see what happens in a co-working space.” The residency was a natural evolution from the peer mentoring group, created by Nan Collantine at Mura Ma which led to the group forming Studio 8 Collective.

Shadow Work - Dez Rez Project, 285 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 4EW

Exhibition runs from 19th June to 18th July 2024

This is my first solo exhibition and I am enormously grateful to Nan Collantine from Mura Ma Artspace, Marple for the opportunity and to Hazel Archer for her invaluable curation and also to Great Northern Warehouse for the space.

The works displayed in Shadow Work were developed initially during the residency, “Beyond the frame”, held at Mura Ma Gallery, Marple in April 2024. Responding to the physical limitations and unique inspiration presented by working in the gallery space alongside five other artists’ practices, Mcdaniel veered from her usual medium to carry out material research into cardboard for building typically kiln-fired forms. In building these works she bends her new medium to traditional ceramic techniques, maintaining the low-waste ethos of clay: “Discarded cardboard is utilised to create coils and build my vessels using the same techniques as ceramics.”

The works shown here were initially created to develop a project celebrating female swimmers and feminine autonomy, rendering three -dimensional female figures that appear dive into large clay pots. In this installation, they are pared back and reworked; solid colour-blocking and the painted shadow elements make them assertive, their presence as artefacts of a feminine tradition looms larger than life, and the hyperbolic handles of some seem almost limb-like, a defiant hand on the hip that speaks volumes. Symbolic of generations of domestic work that has fallen to women, vessels are an archetypal image of the domestic and emotional responsibilities carried by women, expected to nurture and ‘pour out’ their energies into tending others, even literally in maternal terms, to be the ‘vessel’ for a child.

The title Shadow Work speaks, as McDaniel explains, to “the inner work required as a new artist showing up and taking space.” By exploring form on a larger scale than her work in ceramics has previously enabled she inverts the typical function of maquette's—as scaled down rehearsals—McDaniel playfully embodies both the scale of responsibility that befalls women, including women artists making time for their practice, and a sizeable assertion of her artistic ambitions. While colour offers a certain sunny equivocality, Shadow Work encapsulates the integration of self-doubt that haunts almost all artists.

Instagram: @studiosuziemcdaniel