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Fiber Art by Susan Hensel
Phone: (612) 202-9644
Susan is also available for studio visits, lectures, panel discussions, and other visiting artist activities.
Send Susan An Email – Fiber Art by Susan Hensel
Want to know more about fine fiber art by Susan Hensel? Have questions about Susan or her work? Susan is also available for mentoring, collaborating, or other opportunities. Contact Susan Hensel Projects for more information.
Susan Hensel received her BFA from the University of Michigan in 1972. Additionally, she also double majored in painting and sculpture and a concentration in ceramics. With a history, to date, of over 200 exhibitions, more than 30 of them solo, twenty garnering awards. Above all, Hensel’s desire to also communicate stories through art continues to be a powerful motivator.
Hensel’s artwork is also known and collected nationwide. They are represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute. There are also major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, University of Washington, Baylor University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Additionally, archives pertaining to her artist’s books are also available for study at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle.
Susan Hensel
I am a multidisciplinary artist, with a 50+ year career. This career includes a mixed-media practice with embroidery across digital and manual platforms. I also make sculpture and wall art using the colors and techniques of commercial embroidery that are designed on the computer and stitched out on the computer-aided embroidery machine. The aim is to also create an experience for the viewer that overwhelms with color, transcends the quotidian. It encourages one, for even a few seconds, to step outside the narrative of the ego into a place of pure sensation.
As an artist, I also find the beauty and the structure of embroidery thread qualitatively unique. It also deals in optical color perception. However, it also provides a lenticular opportunity due to the tri-lobal structure of the thread and its ability to bend light. Likewise, to quote Jane McKeating, “Color drips off the needle every bit as richly as from a brush.”
Digital embroidery lends itself to hard-edge geometry as well as biomorphic form. The combination of high tech with “women’s work” also provides a contrast of hard/soft, nostalgic/current, objective/non-objective. It also lends itself to modular repetition. Additionally, themes can also be played out quickly on the computer. It is then stitched and sampled oh so slowly on the machine. Then, it is also combined with and without mixed media in a wide-ranging exploration of forms in space.
