From Dargaville, Northland, Sue is a mother of four grown children, with a background in educational administration. She completed her BFA (Hons) at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2016, and subsequently returned to Northland to teach Art and Art History to senior students in a part-time capacity. Sue is an emerging artist and continues to explore and develop her art practice.

 

Her work concentrates on elements of form, surface, and light, while acknowledging the vibrant agency contained within specific materials. Paterson suggests that although materials can be considered inert, they contain the power to seduce us, to draw us in and to hold our attention. 

 

Her series ANSWERING THE HAIL (Reflecting on Perspectives of Materiality), influenced by Minimalists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, she celebrates  and reflects upon operating within a formalist tradition that has historically been dominated by masculine production and theoretical discourse. Using traditionally masculine industrial materials such as steel universal beams, she has applied her own feminine authority to these objects by highlighting properties such as surface and reflection