Susan Hughes is the MFA recipient of the CCA Graduate Award for students graduating in 2021 from the University of Ulster’s BA Fine Art and MFA courses.

Susan is taking over the Project Space, visible from Artillery Street, with new work using mixed media including text, light and suspended gels.

Susan uses language as a malleable conceptual and visual material to create space for alternative narratives to be invented. Through a process of interviewing, writing, transcribing, crafting and analysis, Susan has been abstracting and retelling stories. The experiences that form the content of her work are complex and multi-dimensional, often describing deeply personal physical and physiological sensations while being inside our bodies and intense encounters with nature.

Susan uses crisp text, electrical light/digital video, and bright perspex, effective in their artifice as tools to explore and express natural, yet often psychedelic, sensual experiences.

Susan Hughes is from Belfast. She has completed artist residencies in Ireland and Scandinavia where she has used her fiddle playing as a bartering tool to gain access to local stories. She graduated with an MFA in 2021 from the University of Ulster receiving the CCA and Platform Arts Graduate Awards and has been shortlisted for the RDS graduate award.