current

I am Susan Papas aka Mercy Duddy. I currently make large-scale, rule-based works that blend personal memory with mechanised, process-driven aesthetics, resulting in pieces that are both intimate and systematically detached.

My work arises from a deeply personal archive: a collection of photographs taken by my father, Rudolph Papas, from the 1950s to the 1980s.

By drawing from paint-by-numbers techniques and using archival family photographs as source material, my work explores the complex relationship between memory, authorship, and artistic labour.

Paint-by-numbers, typically associated with amateur art and mass-production kits, becomes a vehicle for meticulous, hand-rendered images. However, instead of following the traditional paint application, I use marker pens, a medium typically associated with craft and illustration, not fine art.

The marker pens introduce a distinct materiality, adding layers of physicality and time-intensive precision to the otherwise rigidly structured process.

My work raises questions about the stability of memory: the familiar faces and places from my family archive are made strange through the regimented, mechanical translation.