Susan Papas

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

I begin my work with a personal archive: a collection of photographs taken by my father, Rudolph Papas, between the 1950s and 1980s. As an observer who always stood slightly apart, he documented our family’s daily life and, through his lens, captured the immigrant experiences of Irish and Cypriot communities as refracted through our immediate household in postwar Britain. These images reveal a persistent tension: my family’s preoccupation with rules, proper appearance, and respectability—an effort to present ourselves as authentically British—while beneath the surface, confusion and ambiguity about our identities quietly simmered. I engage with this archive not simply as a container of memory but as an active site for constructing meaning and interrogating identity. Drawing on both digital manipulation and physical processes, I apply pre-defined rules and contemporary AI tools to transform these intimate records into fractured, large-scale artworks. My approach is methodical and impersonal, echoing the systems that governed our outward lives. As a child growing up in suburban London in the 1970s, my only access to art was through paint-by-numbers kits: mass-produced objects that provided a rigid structure for creativity. These kits are now central to my practice. I adapt their system in my work, filling in the numbered sections with marker pens, a process that is time-consuming and painstaking. The final pieces are assembled from many smaller, discrete elements, physically...

Artwork