Introducing artist Sue Smith
Artist Sue Smith (aka instalogo/Mcshoesue) is the winner of the 2023 Artweeks Mary Moser Award, an annual award established to honour the late Mary Moser’s commitment to Artweeks and to further the career of a professional artist who has taken up art as a second career later in life.
Sue was previously a front-line worker supporting vulnerable adults, the homeless and refugees. She found drawing an escape as she transferred deep-rooted issues around the loss of security onto paper.
Her expansive energetic cityscapes are drawn primarily in pen and ink: hundreds of houses and buildings line imagined streets, often dystopic, and a sense of humanity underpins each. A non-conformist approach to perspective draws in the viewer: “Our brains don’t think in a linear way, and they process multiple perspectives at one: that’s what I’m trying to encourage,” Sue explains. The undefined edges add a sense of dynamism which hint at a story still unresolved.
While Sue’s drawings are metaphors for insecurity, destruction and vulnerability, her 3D ‘maps’ are neither dark nor melancholic. “I’d like to think my cityscapes offer hope,” she says, “because if there’s a map, then there’s a way out. We can all help someone to find it.”
You can see Sue’s work in St John the Evangelist Cloister Gallery, Iffley Road, Oxford (venue 367) alongside art by other artists and an exhibition of many artist postcards which are being auctioned to raise funds for Sobell House Hospice.

For a full feature article s seen in the March edition of the glossy OX Magazine click here:
www.artweeks.org/sites/default/files/news/ox_march_2023_sue_smith.pdf