Susan Eyre

My practice explores intangible things such as the aura of place and the dream of paradise. I am led by a curiosity about how we encounter the physical and the spiritual world and the structures that we put in place to facilitate an escape from reality.

I consider how our shared cultural associations colour our dreams of the perfect idyll and shape our desires for fulfilment. I am fascinated by the many visions that equate with paradise, from a garden sanctuary to a tropical beach holiday via heaven itself. Tracing the pursuit of bliss through ancient mythology and the origins of religion to modern day consumerism I reflect on the possibility of finding paradise in the everyday. As part of my investigations I have been visiting locations called Paradise, such as Paradise Industrial Estate, Hemel Hempstead, to take photographs which I then respond to in my work. This concentrated looking at place has led me to consider the very structure of the matter I am looking at. Within an ordinary space are hidden the building blocks of the universe – intangible and unseen. I have discovered the language of particle physics to be quite like that of mythology – inhabited with mysterious characters like the charm quark and strange quark, governed by fundamental forces that cannot be seen or explained other than by their attributes – like the mythical gods.

I believe there are similarities in our search for the spiritual and the urge to understand the matter of our universe. In the past, to explain the forces of nature we did not understand we created gods and legends. I am interested in drawing on this legacy to discover relationships between ancient and modern belief systems and possible mythologies embedded in an everyday landscape.