Suzanne Abell

Born in Rotterdam in 1964, Suzanne emigrated with her family to Zimbabwe when she was four.  She attended school there until the age of 16, before coming to UK.  Suzanne trained as a dentist specialising in oral surgery and practised in Oxford.

She came to art later in life after becoming increasingly interested in form and movement. Knowledge of anatomy has helped her to understand the power of muscles and the bone structure within.

Suzanne returns to Africa frequently and her deep love of the continent has prompted sculptures of some of her favourite animals, such as elephants and giraffe – usually in motion.

In 2020, Suzanne was a finalist in the David Shepherd Wildlife Artist of the Year competition. In the same year, she was accepted to the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London where she completed a two year diploma in figurative sculpture. In 2023 she started her Masters in Art and Science at Central St Martins which focuses on the relationship between art and science and developing a practice which explores the connections between the two.

Now in her second year, Suzanne is working on a collaboration with the University of Portsmouth. She is creating work around the issue of single use plastic and an enzyme, originally discovered in a bacterium, which can breakdown single use plastic into its constituent ingredients. This will significantly reduce the amount of plastic going to landfill and provide an environmentally friendly way to reuse plastic already in the system. The work is a continuation of her exploration of environmental factors around the loss of wildlife habitats and the conflict created around efforts to protect endangered wildlife. The climate crisis is a defining factor in the search for solutions to the plastic disposal problem and impacts on human/wildlife conflict.