Artist Statement

Angela Susini is an Italian-British artist whose practice investigates sensory perception, material presence, and the body’s relationship to space.

She holds a first-class degree in art restoration, art techniques, and conservation from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, and undertook further study at the UIA – University of International Art. This training informs her materially sensitive and process-driven approach, rooted in care, precision, and an acute awareness of surface and time.

Her work draws on a minimalist visual language informed by Japanese aesthetics, yet moves beyond formal restraint to examine conditions of overstimulation, attention, and withdrawal in contemporary life. Through reduction, repetition, and subtle disruption, Susini constructs environments that recalibrate perception and foreground the act of sensing itself.

Working across painting, textile, video, and installation, she employs gouache, natural pigments, handmade paper, raw canvas, and organic fibres. These materials are activated through gestures that are both controlled and intuitive, often using traditional tools such as Japanese brushes and matcha whisks. Each work is produced as a singular event, resisting repetition and emphasising the temporal and energetic specificity of its making.

Her earlier series Nebula, developed in collaboration with BMW, introduced recurring circular forms functioning as spatial refuges, simultaneously protective and isolating reflecting on the construction of psychological interiors within an accelerated digital culture.

Subsequent bodies of work, including Onsen extend this inquiry through elemental relationships. Drawing from the Japanese thermal bath, Onsen explores states of immersion and mental drift, where water and heat become carriers of memory, shaping a space between physical sensation and internal reflection.

Her ongoing project, Forest Bathing + Zen Collection, marks a shift toward immersive, multi-sensory environments. Drawing from the practice of Shinrin-yoku, the work integrates sound, scent, textile, and moving image to create spatial situations that both soothe and unsettle. These installations invite a slowed, embodied encounter while simultaneously questioning the contemporary desire for retreat, positioning the “restorative” as both necessity and construct.

Art as a response to physical and psychological vulnerability. Since adolescence, her work has developed in parallel with personal experiences of illness, shaping an approach in which grounding, repetition, and sensory awareness operate not only as aesthetic strategies, but as conditions of survival. This introduces a latent tension within the work, where stillness coexists with fragility, and control with exposure.

Alongside her abstract practice, she is developing a figurative series, Apartment Therapy, which examines intimacy, domestic space, and the staging of everyday life. In contrast to her minimal works, these paintings introduce narrative, presence, and movement, forming a counterpoint between interiority and lived experience.

Susini is currently establishing an artist residency in Florence, conceived as a platform for cultural exchange between London and Florence.