Suzanne Bellamy (PhD Univ. Sydney) Australian artist and writer, has been an internationally exhibiting sculptor, potter, printmaker, activist and feminist, who has lived in Sydney and the bush, with a studio at Mongarlowe in southern NSW.

Born in Sydney, educated in History at the University of Sydney 1966-73, Bellamy has worked on the left newspaper The Old Mole, was part of the first group of Women’s Liberation in Sydney from 1969, worked on the first Women’s Liberation  newspapers MeJane and Refractory Girl, taught Women’s Studies and Politics at Macquarie University 1974-80 during the great feminist years and was National Convenor of the First Women and Labour Conference 1978. 

She left academe in 1979 to work full time as a studio artist and independent scholar/writer, began exhibiting artwork from 1981. Bellamy is a published Stein and Woolf scholar. Her first large solo USA show was at the Northampton Center for the Arts in Massachusetts in May/June 2003, and she was Artist in Residence at Smith College during the International Virginia Woolf Conference in 2003. In June 2004 she was a Featured Presenter at the International Virginia Woolf Conference at the University of London in Bloomsbury, with a jazz visual text improvization called Am I Blue?, a word and visual painting interpretation of three Woolf experimental short fictions about war with large canvas paintings as set. In 2011 she was Keynote Presenter at Glasgow University’s International Woolf Conference with a set canvas, libretto and production of the Pageant from Woolf’s Between The Acts. The canvas Woolf and the Chaucer Horse was acquired by the University of Glasgow.

 In 1996 Bellamy created an archaeological satire and museum archive/performance piece, The Lost Culture of Women’s Liberation, the Pre-Dynastic Phase 1969-74 which has been presented in several countries and has now been acquired by the National Library of Australia.   

With her interest in Australian and International Modernism, Bellamy is now fusing art and scholarship in new ways. She has created artwork and text publications in text/image fusion mixed media work, satire and performance projects, modernist writings, Woolf and Stein. The new work Abstract Machines – Taking apart the Machines of Modernism was first presented at the Modernist Objects conference Sorbonne/Paris in June 2018.  

Upcoming exhibition Time and Place

Her next exhibition opening 11th October 2019 at the Altenburg Gallery in Braidwood is entitled Time and Place. In it she further explores identity and habitat on multiple levels from the land to the deepest imaginative spaces of the brain. While Place might be our anchor to the Present, Time can be the vessel which journeys across deep past and utopias of the future. In the paradox of that mix lies one individual life story.  

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