Susan Chapman

‘Lost Faces’ is a textile-based exploration of family photographs inherited without names, stories, or living relatives to provide context. Working from these anonymous images, Susan engages with the tension between presence and absence, memory and forgetting, using cloth and stitch to re-animate faces that have slipped beyond the reach of personal remembrance.
The photographs are fragile fragments of evidence – proof that these individuals existed, yet disconnected from narratives that once gave meaning to their lives. Through textile processes, Susan creates a dialogue between the permanence suggested by the photographic image and the vulnerability of memory. Stitch becomes a form of tracing repair, and contemplation, allowing her to spend time with each face and to acknowledge relationships that survive despite the loss of names and histories.
Textiles carry their own associations with inheritance, domestic labour, and generational continuity. By translating photographic portraits into fabric, thread, and layered surfaces, Susan connects the material language of textiles with the emotional weight of family archives. The work does not reconstruct factual biographies; instead, it creates space for reflection on what remains when personal histories are fragmented or forgotten.
‘Lost Faces’ considers how identity is preserved, altered, erased over time. It asks what we owe to those who came before us and how we might honour lives that can no longer be fully known. Through acts of making, the project offers these unknown ancestors a renewed visibility, transforming overlooked photographs into intimate encounters bridging past and present while acknowledging the enduring mysteries that separate them.
www.susanmchapman.com
@susan_chapman_granary_studio