Susie Leiper: Reopening

Books: how we’ve all needed them in the past year! Libraries too, but they’ve been closed. When Susie’s exhibition Library was forced online in April 2020, nobody foresaw that it would be over a year before it could be presented in the gallery, this time expanded as Reopening. The subtlety of the work really needs to be appreciated in the flesh.

Books are central to Susie’s practice: in fact the activity that kept her going during lockdown was the completion of her large handwritten and illustrated edition of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, which was shortlisted for the John Byrne Annual Award 2020 – 21

https://www.johnbyrneaward.org.uk/annual-winners-shortlist-2020-21/

Susie’s recent work is concerned with the abstraction of the page, the book, the library. Some of her pieces incorporate 19th-century vellum documents, the text partly obliterated, and her artist books recall the precious manuscript books of the middle ages: looking at the old to see the new. As Duncan Macmillan commented, the exhibition is ‘not really about texts at all, but more about the poetry of books as physical things and of libraries as seed beds for the imagination from which the trees of knowledge can grow’.

Trained formally as a scribe on Donald Jackson’s vast Saint John’s Bible project, Susie has gone on to combine lettering and painting as well as pursuing the two disciplines separately. She is as happy painting large canvases and walls as making small tablets and artist books, while carrying out regular commissioned calligraphic work. Susie lives and works in Edinburgh.