Tristan Hoare Gallery is delighted to present Sussy Cazalet’s debut solo show, Ascendance. Cazalet employs traditional techniques, including flat-loom weaving and organic dyeing, using natural fibres and hand-woven methods to craft her tapestries. Equally, Cazalet offers a distinctive, contemporary visual language. Her use of bold patterns layered and confidence in colour represent a departure from more traditional designs and muted palettes typically associated with tapestry.
With a background in design and architecture, Cazalet brings a methodical sensibility to her work. Each shape, proportion and rhythm is chosen with purpose, informed as much by mathematical harmony as by intuition. Cazalet’s geometric astuteness is balanced by the rich array of colours she harnesses; every pigment, wash and gradient is composed from dyes she mixes herself. The amalgam between design-led precision with the rawness and intensity of colour found in her oeuvre creates a powerful tension between control and emotion.
In this exhibition, Cazalet reveals her most personal work to date. Created during a period marked by grief, “many pieces were shaped directly from moments of emotional rupture”. The tapestries reflect her reliance and reverence for the natural world as a stabilising, healing force. The cyclical yet transient nature of the sun and moon, the shifting wind, the falling rain, and the oscillation between light and darkness reflect the fundamentally human experience of emotion we identify with in the natural world.
