![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Installation-view-Sue-Webster-Birth-of-an-Icon-Firstsite-2026.-Photography-by-Richard-Ivey.-4-1230x820.jpeg\"){kind=icon}
At Firstsite, Sue Webster encounters a previous self at its most sincere
\n\n\n\nIn a photograph, a teenager poses in her bedroom, hands set tentatively on her hips. With a spiky nest of inky hair and a black boot planted on a chair, her pose captures the in-betweenness of adolescence; that awkward middle ground between who we were and who we are trying to become. Behind her, red-and-yellow-striped walls are plastered with posters of King Kurt, New Order and – most prominently – Siouxsie Sioux. Blown up to billboard scale and pasted on the wall of the exhibition’s entrance, the image captures artist Sue Webster at the beginning of a life-defining obsession.
\n\n\n\nFandom, at its purest, is akin to religion. You see it in the faces of fainting Beatles fangirls or in the sequin-spangled fervour of modern-day Swifties. In Webster’s solo show you find it in The Crime Scene (2017–), a sprawling installation that covers an entire wall of the main gallery in a forensic mapping of the artist’s life to date. At its centre, a passport photo of a young Webster is orbited – shielded, even – by four Siouxsie and the Banshees albums from which everything else unfurls in a kind of genealogy of pop culture. Webster jumps from the Beatles’s White Album (1968) to a Charles Manson biography to newspaper cuttings of Fred and Rose West with the distinctly adolescent impulse to claim an identity through association – a self-portrait in search of its subject, a tendrilling trajectory of working-class autodidacticism and a testament to the objects we keep.
\n\n\n\nThis dizzying investigation follows the dissolution of her marriage and artistic partnership with Tim Noble, with whom she made work as Tim Noble and Sue Webster for over two decades. But where the duo’s shadow sculptures were a sleek reflection of the market-driven Young British Art movement, this work feels joyously amateurish. Beyond a reclaiming of the cultural landscape that shaped her, Webster reclaims artmaking as an act of selfsovereignty, a way to animate one’s own experience of the world outside of the demands of a ‘brand’.
\n\n\n\nInpatient letters speak to a troubled adolescence spent in a paediatric psych ward, where she adopted Siouxsie as a kind of surrogate mother. Now as an adult, it seems that Siouxie’s image functions less as a parent and more like a cypher for this newfound agency. In 2019 and during COVID, Webster painted 18 Siouxsie-inspired jackets that hang in the gallery like bats, echoes of her time as a self-proclaimed ‘teenage banshee’. Now aged fifty-nine, there’s something poignant and cyclical about Webster returning to this typically teenage act of customisation. It’s fandom as a method; a way to encounter a previous self, perhaps at the moment when it was at its most sincere.
\n\n\n\nThe exhibition culminates in Webster’s most literal self-portraits: giant oils of the artist pregnant at fifty-two. They are light, often unfinished and speak to a reproductive freedom that mirrors an artistic one. No longer a sheepish teenager or half of an artworld power-couple, they depict the artist as a singular creative source. In the final room, The Epiphany (2026) depicts Webster and her son as a Madonna and Child. It’s a touching act of self-mythology that nevertheless feels like an act of surrender. Icons are useful because they’re static, trapped in their own frame. Much better to be a fan.
\n\n\n\nSue Webster: Birth of an Icon is on view at Firstsite, Colchester, through 10 May
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