Kerry Souter

What Makes Kerry Souter’s Work Unique

Kerry’s distinctive approach to painting is shaped by an unusual creative lineage. Born in Dundee in 1970, she studied Textile Design and Surface Decoration at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, graduating with a BA (Hons) in 1992. That textile background, with its deep understanding of surface, layering, and tactile quality, remains at the heart of everything she does. Years of working with felt and fabric developed an intuitive sensitivity to how materials interact, accumulate, and transform, a knowledge that translates directly into her multi-layered painting process.

Working in acrylic paint and mixed media, Kerry builds each painting through a slow, additive and subtractive process. She layers texture, semi-transparent glazes, and collage, then takes away, scraping and eroding the surface before building again. This rhythm of adding and removing mirrors the natural processes she observes along Scotland’s coastline: the way tides shape sand and shingle, moss and lichen grow on stone, and streams wear desire paths through the landscape. Each finished work carries the trace of its own making, a palimpsest of decisions, marks, and material history.

The paintings in the Come Home series push this approach into deeply personal territory. Rather than treating maps as tools of orientation, Kerry uses them as emotional frameworks, subjective, unstable, and shaped by lived experience. Lines emerge as routes, paths, or boundaries but resist fixed systems of navigation. They drift, overlap, and erode, reflecting the way memory edits geography and how relationships stretch across distance without breaking. Family, though not depicted directly, is present as an underlying structure, felt through separation, return, and the quiet persistence of connection.

Titles like Almost Home, The Distance Between Us, and Traces of Home guide the viewer towards these emotional geographies without prescribing a single reading. The works remain deliberately open-ended, embracing uncertainty and curiosity as ways of navigating both external landscapes and internal terrain. It is this balance between specificity and openness, between the deeply personal and the universally felt, that gives Kerry’s paintings their quiet power.

"Kerry’s paintings operate as emotional geographies, mapping the space between memory and place, distance and belonging. Her layered surfaces carry the same sense of accumulated time as the Scottish coastline that inspires them, inviting collectors to discover new details with each encounter."