Susan Derges studied painting in London and Berlin in the 1970s which informed a subsequent wide-ranging exploration of photographic image making, particularly through her large-scale camera-less photograms of some of the shorelines and rivers of Devon and Dartmoor. In the early 1980s she lived and worked in Japan for 6 years and this formative period has influenced much of her image making and thinking, particularly concerning the natural world and our relationship to it.
She has worked in residence at the Museum for the History of Science in, Oxford, (1999-2000) and Kingswood forest in Ashford, Kent (1999-2000); collaborated with the Royal Museums Greenwhich, exhibiting the Mortal Moon series at the Queen’s Palace Greenwich (2018 -2019) and informally with the Marine biology department at the University of Plymouth, who she consulted during the production of a body of work titled Tide Pools that were exhibited in Sea Gardens at the Royal Albert memorial Museum, Exeter (2019) and in Squaring the Circles at the Royal Photographic Society, Bristol, in 2022 including subsequent touring shows at Scarborough Museum (2023) and Dalkeith House, Edinburgh (2024).
More recent work has been concerned with recreated environments, combining imagery made on location with phenomena modelled within the spaces of her studio and dark room; collaborations with writers and poets include River Taw (Michael Hue Williams Fine Art, London 1997) ; Woman Thinking River (Fraenkel Gallery, San Fransisco and Danziger Gallery, New York 1999) ; Liquid -Form (Michael Hue Williams Fine Art, London 1999) ; Elemental (Steidl, Germany 2010) ; Shadow Catchers, (the V&A, London 2010) ; Squaring the Circles (RPS 2022).
Her works can be found in public and private collections world-wide. Susan was awarded an RPS Honorary Fellowship in 2014.
