Sue Webster – Full Leather Jackets

Description

Full Leather Jackets book documents a series of Sue’s hand-painted leather jackets inspired by punk icon Siouxsie Sioux and displayed in our major exhibition Sue Webster: Birth of an Icon.

Created during lockdown, the project saw Sue Webster hand-paint Siouxsie and The Banshees imagery onto vintage biker jackets, sourced from Spitalfields Market or donated by friends. Over time, the series grew into a collection of 18 unique jackets, each modelled by a cast of the artist’s friends and misfits in a catwalk-style exhibition staged in Webster’s studio on 1 Dec 2021.

The book captures the raw energy, humour, and obsessive craft behind the work, featuring jackets adorned with meticulously hand-painted badges and imagery, embodying Sue Webster’s punk ethos: “If it don’t exist – invent it.”

Photographed by fashion photographer Alex Sainsbury and architectural photographer Ed Reeve, Full Leather Jackets is a vivid document of a deeply personal body of work rooted in music, memory, and DIY culture.

• Softback
• 120 pages
• 27.3 × 20.5 cm
• Published Dec 2021 by Black Baby Publishing, ISBN: 9781739990299
• Part of our exhibition range for the major exhibition Sue Webster: Birth of an Icon.

About the artist

Sue Webster is an artist who established her reputation in the mid-1990s, working with her then-partner Tim Noble. Together they rose to prominence, making abstract shadow sculptures assembled from seemingly random objects.

Sue published the visual biography I Was a Teenage Banshee in 2019. A Künstlerroman (artist’s coming of age novel), the book combines personal memoir with a visual narrative of her evolution as an artist and describes how listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees helped guide her through a troubled adolescence.

In recent years, Sue has been painting in oils, turning her focus inward to create a striking series of large-scale self-portraits.