Invited artist: SUSAN HENSEL
NOAA-redux
fabric print
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I make sculptural textile works seeking to transform personal experience, private and public spaces, and notions of beauty, through the alchemy of color, scale, lighting and placement. I combine mixed-media practices with fabric and embroidery across digital and manual platforms. As an established artist with a 50-year career, I provide an experience of “radical beauty” which invites viewer to a place of wonder and meditation.
At the center of my technical process is an innovative approach to digital embroidery: designing in the computer and stitching out on a computer-aided machine. My knowledge of materials makes it possible for me to create small to large scale hard edge sculpture from soft fabrics that paradoxically keep their crisp form with minimal armatures.
Digital machine embroidery is not a substitute for, nor a speedier version or imitator of, handwork. Its use is a mindset & a media choice. Historically, flatness is a key characteristic of most embroidery. My work breaks ground by engaging both sculptural and cultural space. I am using thread and fiber techniques to shift light and perception through structures and forms in the real world.
Embroidery thread is trilobal in structure. It bends light in multiple directions. Since all color is reflected light, when the angle of reflection changes, so does the perception of color. The finished works dance in the fields of color perception while demonstrating process and movement in otherwise static forms. I explore scale and three-dimensionality, from tabletop to architectural scale.
Digital embroidery lends itself to hard-edge geometry as well as biomorphic form. The combination of high-tech with what historically has been considered "women's handiwork" provides a holistic contrast of hard/soft, nostalgic/current, objective/subjective. It also lends itself to modular repetition and re-combinations. Themes can be played out quickly in the computer and then stitched and sampled ever so-slowly on the machine – combined with and without mixed media in a wide-ranging exploration of forms in space.
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Susan Hensel received her BFA from University of Michigan in 1972 with a double major in painting and sculpture and a concentration in ceramics. She has a history, to date, of more than 300 exhibitions, 35 of them solo, twenty + garnering awards. In the coming two years, Susan has solo and 2-person and group exhibitions scheduled in Ellicot, MD; Bloomington, MN ; Hopkins, MN; Duluth, MN and the Garrett Museum of Art, Garrett, Indiana.
Hensel's artwork is known and collected nationwide, represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute with major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts , University of Washington, Baylor University and University of Colorado at Boulder. Archives pertaining to her artists books are available for study at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle.
In recent years Hensel has been awarded multiple grants and residencies through the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Art to Change the World, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Ragdale Foundation.
Hensel's curatorial work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan with the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery in Minneapolis. The Susan Hensel Gallery continues on Artsy.net as an online project promoting Midwest artists with a particular interest in materiality. Hensel has curated over one hundred exhibitions, and supporting events, of emerging and mid-career artists from all over the United States and Canada
