Susannah was born in Britain in 1963. After completing a five-year joint degree in Drawing, Painting and Art History at Edinburgh University (in collaboration with Edinburgh College of Art) she painted for a number of years in London after a period working from an old fisherman’s net–loft in Cornwall. She has had a number of very successful solo shows and her work has been selected for various prestigious awards and open exhibitions. In 1996 she and her husband, the photographer Simon Denison, left London to set up home and studios in Shropshire where she lives today. In 1997 she started a family and continued to paint albeit with far less time while she brought up two children.

Susannah is fascinated by the human need to classify the world around us in order to make it more understandable. She likes to incorporate some of the visual methods used in conventional, often scientific, classification in a more creative, playful way in relation to the subject-matter in her own paintings. For example she often labels her subject-matter or uses letters and numbers that refer the viewer to a key. Sometimes she might put in lists of component parts including chemical breakdowns of the paints used.

When deciding on the subjects in each picture Susannah tries to get what she calls her ‘trinity of subjects’ into the composition. She combines organic subjects taken from the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom with a particular object taken from the man-made world.

Susannah is meticulous about the stability and light-fastness of the materials that she uses to create her paintings and only uses the highest quality materials in order to ensure the longevity of her work.