The Shape of Chaos
On Sue Webster
When Sue Webster moved out of her childhood home, her father bestowed on her three cardboard boxes chock-full of her life up to that point. Webster writes in I Was a Teenage Banshee (2019) that, after a chaotic youth, she “dragged with me through life those three little boxes the painful way, the way of suffering the same way that Jesus Christ carried his own wooden cross through the old city of Jerusalem and on to the path of crucifixion”. Woah, I thought as I read that, that’s me, I could’ve written that. What an image of the baggage of childhood, young-woman-as-Christ bearing the burden of her early years, packed up in boxes on her back.
My first encounter with Sue Webster’s art was in 2012, when I was fifteen years old and in a bedroom probably just like hers. I’d come across pictures online of the works Youngman and The Individual (both 2012), created by Webster and her former partner Tim Noble. The pieces are representative of the pair’s “shadow works,” careful constructions of detritus (in this case, wooden scraps) that, when backlit with a projector, cast imposing shadow portraits of the artists on an adjacent wall. I didn’t realize it at the time but, having now swallowed I Was a Teenage Banshee whole, it’s apparent those wooden scraps are Webster’s cross.
I’ve followed Sue Webster’s work with zeal in the years since that fateful rainy night in my childhood bedroom. I was and remain greatly moved by Webster’s works with Tim Noble, but what positively overwhelms me with feeling are her solo works, those she has created since her separation from Noble. At the center of these works lies Webster’s namesake, Siouxsie Sioux, the force behind the potent, fearsome post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees. Siouxsie appears throughout Webster’s Full Leather Jackets series (2019-2020), eighteen leather jackets hand-painted with iconography from the artist’s adolescent years spent under the tutelage of the Banshees: Siouxsie’s spiky hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and lined lips; badges and passes from Webster’s travels following the band on tour; Banshees members Kenny Norris, Peter Fenton, and Steven Severin in profile.
Looking at a photograph of young Sue Webster in a similarly bespoke leather jacket, I begin to imagine just what these jackets mean to her now. Siouxsie Sioux became “the surrogate mother I’d long been searching for”, Webster writes, standing in for the lack of attachment she felt to her own mother. To Webster, the jackets serve as both aspirations and markers of her journey toward the fully realized self; when in one, Webster’s in the arms of Siouxsie’s embrace. I think of how I feel wearing my PJ Harvey and, for that matter, “Teenage Banshee” T-shirts: Harvey and Webster (who are, incidentally, friends) are my surrogate mothers. Wearing those shirts, I’m pronouncing myself as not just in kinship with them, but also in pursuit of the self I want to become.
I achieved just such a feeling when looking upon one of Sue Webster’s “spidergraphs” for the first time. Starting from the premise that Webster learned everything she knows from the first four Siouxsie and the Banshees records, each spidergraph is a chaotic web linking the landmarks of her personal history with The Scream (1978), Join Hands (1979), Kaleidoscope (1980), and Juju (1981). Chaos is, indeed, central to Webster’s work for me. Chaos characterizes the spidergraphs, yes, but also works such as Chaos Paintings (2016); her early, conjured-from-the-trash-heap shadow works with Tim Noble (1997-2014); and her recent work, The Crime Scene (2017-2026), in which she has finally, it seems, cast the cross off her back, unpacked the boxes containing the remnants of her childhood, and connected them—clues from her chaotic early days—with a barely-visible thread.
What I see Sue doing across her body of work is the paradoxical achievement of bringing order to an internal chaos and, at the same time, accepting that chaos as an inextricable part of herself. Hospitalized as a teen (for, one could say, her “chaos”), the daily routine of ward life became for her “a safety net, a comfort among the chaos, something to hold on to in order to help let the imagination spiral out of control”. Every day contained three meals, three doses of pills, timed visits from doctors on their rounds; every week contained three group therapy sessions.
Like Sue Webster, I, too, spent part of my adolescence in a hospital—let’s just say for a touch of consumption. In my experience, the routine Webster writes about passes the time and prevents one from slipping inside an inner “chaos.” One’s tendency, though, is to try to make sense of the chaos lurking beneath. I’m reminded of Webster’s and Noble’s Blindfolded paintings (2013-2014), which resemble Rorschach tests. When considered in relation to Webster’s early years of weathering her personal chaos, the idea of a self-portrait-as-a-Rorschach-test feels charged: What do you see in me? What do I see in myself?
Let me suggest that Sue Webster has catalogued her struggle with these questions throughout her oeuvre, perhaps no more so than in a recent series of painted self-portraits with titles such as Birth of an Icon (2024), Self Portrait with Gloves On (2024), and The Epiphany (2026). The paintings (which, sadly for me, hang thousands of miles away at Firstsite in Colchester, a part of Webster’s first major solo show, Sue Webster: Birth of an Icon) are undeniably portraits of the self Webster has discovered—or is discovering—herself to be. Waldemar Januszczak, art critic for The Sunday Times, compared them to “the countesses painted by Gainsborough”, marking a decisive contribution “not just to [Webster’s] art but to British portraiture”.
Between the woman in the Birth of an Icon portraits and the young girl in the hospital ward can be traced a long, winding line. With Sue’s encouragement, I’m beginning to eke out a similarly jagged line to my own girlhood self. How could two young girls, decades and an ocean apart, have such similar experiences? In Siouxsie Sioux, Sue Webster found a surrogate mother, a missing part of her chaotic identity and guiding light for the self she sought to become. In Sue Webster, if I may be so bold, I’ve found the same. Her art tells the story of her full realization, the bringing of order to acceptance of her inner chaos. In her recent self-portraits, Webster looks a bit like Siouxsie Sioux. She’s beautiful.
I knew nothing of this artist, and now my mind and heart are richer for it. I too prefer her solo work and am intrigued by the concept of childhood trauma being a wooden cross that is carried for decades....... I am going to explore this concept in my writing on the very next rainy day. Another thing - I really enjoyed the quality clickbait, I may take that idea.