About Sue Webster
Webster established her reputation in the mid 1990s, when, working with her then partner Tim Noble, she rose to prominence making abstract shadow self-portraits created by assembling seemingly random objects lit by a single light source. In 2002, she famously collaborated with the architect Sir David Adjaye on The Dirty House in Shoreditch - the first of two distinctive and ambitious residential projects. More recently they transformed the infamous Mole Man of Hackney’s derelict ruin into a bespoke home and studio which won a New London Architecture Award in 2021.
Webster published the biography I Was a Teenage Banshee in 2019, which combines personal memoir with a visual narrative of her evolution as an artist and describes how listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees helped guide her through a troubled adolescence. Next came the acclaimed exhibition ‘Full Leather Jackets’ (2019-2021) - a suite of 18 hand-painted leather jackets, presented in the form of a fashion show.
In recent years, Webster has been painting large-scale self-portraits in oils. These works depict a woman defiantly pregnant in her fifties, with a prominent belly, often dressed in a defaced leather jacket peppered with Siouxsie and the Banshees badges – a kind of modern-day, punk Virgin and Child. The series, part of which featured in the TIN MAN ART exhibition ‘The Witch Burns’ at Fitzrovia Chapel in 2024, marked a new chapter for Webster as a solo artist.