Katharine Wootton The beacon of this year’s summer, the Olympic Games, might be a good 200 miles or so from our York doorstep, but for one York artist and former York St John University student, the Olympic Games is threaded into her latest work reeling in attraction in Selfridges London.
Installation artist Susanne Davies, who graduated from York St John’s in 2010 and still exhibits at Bar Lane Studios, has been commissioned by global sportswear giant Nike to create a site-specific installation for the Nike House of Innovation. All about the summer of sport, the House of Innovation will see the launch of five new Nike products designed for the modern athlete in Selfridge’s Ultralounge. This forms part of Nike’s immersion in the Olympic spirit, something they pride themselves on for every Olympic Games around the globe.
Susanne’s work has been commissioned specifically in response to the brand new lightest ever flyknit trainer, made with just one thread. Specialising in using a rainbow of coloured embroidery for her installations, Susanne’s style and exploration of threads, lines, connections and space are all to be knitted together into this large-scale project to help promote the new fancy footwear.
Speaking of her latest project for the Nike Company, Susanne said: “This has been an amazing privilege and experience, working with the designers at Nike and Green Room Retail to create a space within a space at the Ultra Lounge in Selfridges. Working with the flyknit product and the spools from which the product was made, felt within the whole ethos of my practice. I was really excited by the project. Working on this has given me a real insight into working within a huge project; I am so pleased I was able to be part of this.”
Since leaving York St John University two years ago, Susanne has sewn up an attractive portfolio including an installation threaded from 20km of cotton for the opening of Hugo Boss in Manchester, a fragile assembly of thread and glass for the 2011 Illuminating York and most recently, a co-exhibition with fine art photographer Jack Cook at Bar Lane Studios, which One&Other reported on last month. She has also been commissioned to create a work for the brand new Headquarters of York City Council who will open their doors on Station Rise later this year.
Susanne’s work is a multisensory experience of cottons, colours, sights and textures, always attentive to space and time. With an interest into probing into the feminine, the domestic and personal and collective histories, Susanne’s work, no matter what the commission, always stretches across peripheries and generates dialogues between place, space and movement.
