Susan Canfield was born in London and now lives in Suffolk.  Her interest in textiles was initiated in secondary school by an excellent  needlework teacher and the Needlework Development Scheme, Glasgow.  She trained as a primary school teacher in Nottinghamshire and taught for seventeen years, developing textile work in the classroom during that time.  After giving up a deputy headship to pursue her interest in creative embroidery, Susan enrolled for the City & Guilds Creative Studies course at Cambridge, completing parts I and II in 1992 and 1994 respectively.  A  year later she became a founder member of EAST, of which she is currently treasurer.  She exhibits with EAST and works to commission.  Her textile artwork has now found its way into homes from Braintree in Essex, to Preston, Lancashire and the Isle of Mull.  She had a cushion selected by the Embroiderers’ Guild for auction at Phillips, New Bond Street in December 2000.

Although Susan’s work in the last fifteen years has taken a wide variety of forms, more recently the majority of it has been three-dimensional.  Some of her pieces have been elaborate constructions, which have taken their inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including Maori ketes (bags woven from the New Zealand flax plant), the Sutton Hoo grave goods, and silver birch trees.  In each new piece of work, she endeavours to explore further possibilities for fabric construction and to extend the medium in new and unexpected ways.  A principal technique employed has been “free” machine embroidery, which is used to create a variety of textures, further worked with hand stitching. 

“I use sketchbooks extensively in my work in which I gather as much visual information as possible to use in my designs.  My work has encompassed a number of different themes in recent years, most notably from history , poetry , and my travels in Britain and abroad.  For the EAST exhibition “Stitched Up” (2005/6), I      reflected on  how day length has an inescapable effect on the lives of people living in northern Europe.  This work was inspired by  a journey to Scotland on the shortest day of the year, and observing the freezing fog clinging to the branches of the trees.  This led me on, in the next exhibition “East 13”, to create a body of work based on a study of the silver birch.