Mike Kilyon

Suki Illuminated 2019 Mike Kilyon

These images offer a snapshot of a six-year collaboration between life-model and poet Suki and photographer and web-designer Bel.

Suki and Bel's multi-media project commenced with a blog discussing modelling, Art and Life. This was followed up with the weekly serialisation of Suki's illustrated three-part biographical tale, A Small Life, Two Small Lives and True Life Nude. These online tales, illustrated by dozens of artists with whom Suki has worked, have each now been published as print editions.

Two poetry collections ensued: KUNST, themed on the artist-model relationship and illustrated by sixteen artists, and Thin Bones Like Wishbones, a joint venture with poet Sue Vickerman.

Video shorts based on each book in the trilogy were written and narrated by Suki and produced by Bel. Additionally this creative twosome made more than a dozen film shorts documenting life-rooms and individual artists at work around Yorkshire and beyond.

Suki's manager and minder is Sue Vickerman and Bel the photographer's indispensable assistant is Mike Kilyon. As Suki and Bel's 'gofers', Sue and Mike organised performance events, poetry readings and life-drawing sessions to celebrate different stages of the project's development, not to mention several exhibitions of artwork created by the innumerable artists who have been inspired by Suki.

This booklet has been published alongside a final celebratory exhibition in Bel's home (in the context of the 2019 Three Peaks Arts Trail), the culmination of 'The Suki Project'.

Suki the life-model and Bel the photographer are the created personas of Sue Vickerman and Mike Kilyon.