Camille Souter was born Betty Pamela Holmes in Northampton in 1929. The nickname ‘Camille’ was given to her after the heroine of Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias by her first husband, actor Gordon Souter. Despite being born in England, the artist-to-be was brought up in Ireland. She excelled in art classes at Glengara Park School in Dún Laoghaire, but decided to train as a nurse at Guy’s Hospital in London. During her apprenticeship, she contracted tuberculosis. As part of her convalescence on the Isle of Wight, she took occupational therapy art classes. With no formal training to speak of, the largely self-taught Souter nonetheless prolonged therapeutic learning, sculpture this time (under Yann Renard-Goulet), as her recovery continued in Dublin. The developing artist decided to finish her nurse training in London, graduating in 1952, only to immediately abandon the medical field in favour of painting.
Souter’s art has an undeniable architectonic attraction, a subject she disseminates in her contemporary landscapes depicting factories, docks, canals and slaughterhouses. This penchant was partly enabled by an Italian Government Scholarship in 1958, a period during which she took in as many Italian wonders as she could. Adapting her materials depending on her context (a lack of funds saw her use aluminium bicycle paint at one time around 1959-1960), various influences inform but never dictate her work. Tying Souter’s art down to a specific movement or aesthetic is near impossible and ultimately useless.
Her first solo show was at El Habano restaurant on Grafton Street in 1956. The following year, the Clog Gallery in Dublin housed a subsequent solo exhibition featuring recent oils, gouache and monotypes. In 1958, she exhibited at the New Vision Gallery in London, before leaving for Italy. Back in Ireland, she continued to exhibit work regularly: she represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale (1961), and she exhibited along with Barrie Cooke at the Ulster Museum (1965); at New Gallery on Belfast’s Grosvenor Road (1965); at The Irish Imagination 1959-1971 in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin and later Washington (1971); and she was included in the Irish Women Artists: 1870-1970 exhibition (2014). The Douglas Hyde Gallery held a retrospective of her work in 1980, as did the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2001.
Throughout her career, Souter has received numerous prizes including: the Oireachtas Landscape Award (1973); the Irish American Cultural Institute’s Gainey Award (1975); the Grand Prix International de l’Art Contemporain de Monte Carlo (1977); the Tony O’Malley award (1998); and the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Distinguished Career Award (2000). She was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Trinity College Dublin (2015).
Souter lives and works between Achill Island, Co. Mayo and Dublin.
