My current practice involves
Textiles continue at the heart of my practice: cloth, colour, print and stitch are the materials I know deeply and return to constantly. My recent work is bringing expressive drawing and portraiture into that established language, exploring people, memory, family history and the connections between us.
I am currently developing work in which drawn and painted faces move onto fabric, becoming layered through transparency, print, stitch and constructed cloth. This is not a move away from textiles, but an expansion of the way I use them.
Alongside my own studio practice, I continue to exhibit and share my work publicly. Recent activity includes exhibiting at Five Arrows Gallery, Exbury Gardens, in spring 2026, and exhibiting and trading at the Festival of Quilts, NEC Birmingham, in 2025.
Teaching remains an active and important part of my working life. I teach regularly through Granary Studio, the creative teaching space I founded in Owslebury, Hampshire, where students can explore textiles and mixed-media practice through workshops, courses and supported development.
The short version of a very colourful story.
Susan Chapman is an artist, educator and founder of Granary Studio in Owslebury, Hampshire. Her practice has grown through a lifetime of looking, drawing, teaching, writing, stitching, experimenting and paying attention to people.
Textiles remain at the heart of her work. Cloth, colour, print and stitch are materials she knows deeply, but her current practice is expanding through drawing, painting, portraiture, family photographs and constructed form. The work is becoming more personal, more direct, and more concerned with the fragile connections between memory, identity and belonging.
Susan’s current body of work, "Lost Faces", began with inherited family photographs. Many of the people in the images are clearly family, but their names and stories have disappeared. Rather than attempting to reconstruct factual biographies, Susan uses drawing, colour, print and stitch to spend time with them, imagine them, and bring them into a renewed form of visibility.
About Susan
The work is rooted in family, but it is not only private. It asks wider questions: what remains when stories are lost; how identity is preserved or erased; what we inherit without knowing it; and how we honour people whose lives can no longer be fully recovered.
Susan has always worked from observation. She describes herself as a people watcher, interested in gesture, attitude, relationships and the way people interact with one another and the world around them. Her sketchbooks are central to this process. They are not precious objects, but working places: full of notes, drawings, samples, reflections, fragments of writing and the beginnings of ideas.
Susan's established textile language is broad. She works with dyed, painted, printed, discharged and screen-printed surfaces, building images through collage, hand and machine stitch, embellishment, layering and construction. She has worked in two and three dimensions, with book forms, large-scale pieces and textile works that move between image, object and surface.
Alongside this long textile practice, Susan is now allowing drawing and painting to play a more visible role. Recent work includes faces drawn from old photographs, experiments with underpainting, transparent surfaces, printed cloth and the possibility of larger or more sculptural forms. These developments do not replace her textile practice; they extend it. The drawn image is beginning to move into cloth, and cloth is becoming part of the image.
Susan’s artistic life is informed by a wide range of experience. She grew up in a family shaped by music, books, gardens, making and close observation. Her Welsh and Scottish heritage, her parents’ creativity, her father’s drawing and music, her mother’s textile skills, and her own lifelong relationship with gardening, sport, landscape and people all feed into the way she sees the world.
Before her full-time creative and teaching career, Susan worked for IBM as an IT systems engineer. She later developed a substantial career in art and textile education, teaching adults from complete beginners through to advanced and degree-level students. She has taught at Eastleigh College, West Dean College and through City & Guilds programmes, and was author and course manager for a Foundation Degree in Stitched Textiles.
Since 2010, Susan has owned and run Granary Studio, the teaching studio attached to her home in Owslebury. There she teaches printmaking, screen printing, stitch, mentoring and creative-development courses. She also hosts a programme of visiting tutors, offering students access to a broad range of textile, mixed-media and creative practices.
Teaching remains an active and important part of Susan’s working life. Although she has stepped back from touring widely as a freelance lecturer and tutor, she continues to teach regularly at Granary Studio. Her teaching is grounded in knowledge, generosity and practical experience. She is interested not only in technique, but in helping students develop confidence, ideas and a more personal relationship with their own work.
Susan has exhibited widely across the UK and Europe, including solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, textile shows and major national events. Her career includes exhibitions with groups such as Studio 21, By Design and Room 6, international quilt and textile festivals, and work shown in the UK, Holland, France, Germany, Russia and the USA. She has also judged textile shows nationally and internationally, including events in Europe.
Her qualifications include Studio Practice and Defining Practice at Newlyn School of Art, an MA in Fine Art from the University of Chichester, a PGCE from the University of Portsmouth, a Diploma of Higher Education in Stitched Textiles with distinction, City & Guilds qualifications in patchwork, quilting and adult teaching, and an earlier degree in Technological Mathematics from Aston University.
Susan’s recent professional direction reflects a shift in emphasis. She remains a teacher and mentor, but is placing more focus on her own practice, new exhibitions, residencies, public projects and a more ambitious development of her current work. AGORA: Mentoring on Tour with Newlyn School of Art is part of that process, giving her the time, structure and challenge to ask where the work might go next.
Across her career, certain themes remain consistent: people, observation, colour, memory, family, relationship and the need to make sense of life through making. Susan’s work is personal, but it is not closed. It invites recognition. It speaks to anyone who has looked at old photographs, wondered about those who came before them, and felt the strange pull of a story that is partly present and partly lost.