Abbey Fellow Susie Green (January–March 2026) reflects on her residency at the BSR in a new blog. Sharing insights into her experience in Rome, she discusses the research she carried out during her time at the School and how it has shaped her practice.
Spanning painting, performance, and sound, my work features feminine protagonists claiming power unapologetically. Throughout my work, dress, fetish, and disguise are constant sources of inspiration, with bodies adorned in preparation for ambiguous scenarios of pleasure, abandon, and release. Colour-saturated tableaus of escapism and excess sit alongside lived states of anxiety and tension; figures shape shift and smoulder, appearing on the brink of transcending the confines of their skin or melting into contained fantasy worlds.
My research in Rome began with a focus on exploring figurative excess and decorative thresholds within Baroque frescoes. I see my research now as a journey into a far more complex, hybrid body. Through the many open mouths of dynamic sculptures, into resonant throats of fountains and holy wells, within multiple stomachs of museums and archives, and amongst the dark guts of painted tombs, and hidden crypts. This body of Rome that I experienced is surrounded by a many layered skin, never fully permeable.
At the beginning of my residency I visited Bernini’s sculpture of the ‘Ecstasy of St Theresa’ inside the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. A pilgrimage of sorts, I fell in love. Surprised to be putting a coin into a box to illuminate her, I then stared at gorgeous Theresa, held floating on her ethereal cloud, expressing her vision with an endless silent moan. At first seduced by her presence and parted lips, I was then saddened by my voyeurism. Looking into her mouth, I was then swallowed whole, and my Rome body journey began.
I visited an abundance of churches throughout my time in Rome, including The Chiesa del Gesù to view illusionistic ceiling frescoes by Giovanni Battista Gaulli. The fleshy, marble tones of this church interior (and so many more!) read to me like a sacred, illuminated womb. Looking up, I saw saintly bodies propelled towards a pastel-hued idea of a heaven, while subversive sinners tumbled downwards into an imagined, dirty hell. My eye was drawn to one feminine figure amongst the mass turmoil above, suspended at a midpoint within the celestial painted sky, her body waist deep inside a grey mist. Hovering in this space outside of binary opposites, she smiled happily down at me.
Inside the same church I saw a sign labelling the ‘Macchina Barocca’ — a 300-year-old spectacle and ‘Baroque Machine’ combining a moving painting, theatrical lighting, high glitz sculpture and a disembodied recorded voice. I began to imagine – what might a Baroque Machine for my own body look like and how would it hold me? What pleasure, rest or relief might it provide?
Back in the studio, I painted my own imaginary machines—ornate, swirling contraptions for the exhausted body, promising metamorphosis, pleasure, and relief. My colourful figurative forms shifted between states of taught and loose, dark and luminous; dissolving, transcending, and reconstituting themselves.
Throughout my time in Rome I found myself seduced by, and imagining myself becoming, the many fetishised, ornamental objects I encountered on research visits — wanting to inhabit their materiality somehow — while also questioning the labour, exploitation, and stories embedded within them. I sketched self portraits… as a crystal chandelier, an ornamental bell, a gushing fountain, a stucco angel, a fragment of a colossal statue, a chain of rosary beads…so many objects to question and desire.
Shared dinners with brilliant residents, workshops, library forays, and studio visits broadened and enriched my research. For example, during a Trans-inclusive workshop at the BSR led by curator and consultant Dani Martiri I learnt about ‘Cybele’, the mythical ‘Magna Mater’ and her priestess followers the ‘Galli’ —figures whose rituals reframe Roman notions of power, gender and devotion. Conversations with curator and art historian Marta Pellerini introduced me to Etruscan mythologies and ‘Vanth’ – a benevolent, harness wearing goddess of the underworld. I also discovered that Etruscan demons were depicted in blue rather than red – an unexpected chromatic delight. Meeting with artist Eloise Fornieles brought me to ‘Madame Lucrezia’ and Rome’s ‘Talking Statues’—public objects once animated by speech and civic address. And how great to meet artist Anna Gloria Flores (HYDRA) and learn more about her own ritualised, creative world.
At night I lie in bed and think of Madame Lucrezia, Saint Teresa, and the multitude of carved or painted figures I encountered in Rome, their mouths held forever open in male gazey poses of
terror, ecstasy, or transverberation. I feel empathy and concern, especially for Teresa, continually observed until she might crumble into dust. I imagine one day she will shift her posture, let out a fantastically wild scream, and turn to face the wall. No longer available for viewing, she will finally be allowed to rest.
