current

I am Susan Papas, also known as Mercy Duddy. My current work starts with a deeply personal archive: a collection of photographs taken by my father, Rudolph Papas. He was an observer who stood back and documented the lives of my family. I have focused on his photographs from the 1950s to the 1980s, as these capture the immigrant experiences of Irish and Cypriot communities as seen through my immediate family.

My family were obsessed with following the rules, and how we appeared to the outside world was of the utmost importance. We had all the trappings to seem British, but beneath the surface, confusion about our history and identity simmered away.

I am engaging with this archive not only as a repository of information, but also as an active site of meaning-making and identity construction. I manipulate the photographs using pre-defined rules and AI tools to create large-scale works on either canvas or paper.

I loved paint-by-numbers kits as a child; they were the closest I got to art. The mass-production kits reflect something essential about my early life in the London suburbs in the 1970s.

I have adapted the paint-by-numbers method as part of my process, filling in each numbered section with marker pens. This is time-consuming and painstaking work. The final piece consists of many smaller sections fixed together. While the original photographs in this archive evoke intimacy, nostalgia, and personal history for me, I alter them through a systematic and impersonal process to form something else. The rules, the processes, the manipulation, the amateur art methods, and the fracturing all capture something about my family as we tried to assimilate into postwar Britain.