“Hey, Marge…Have you seen Susan recently? View new Textile Art by Susan Hensel

“I hear she got her mojo back?”

REALLY?

It sometimes seems like I’ve been sleeping, or drifting around underwater, amorphous, like jellyfish or plankton, settling like Marine Sediment. View more textile art below.

Other times, the studio was aflame with fury! Strange creatures arrived on pure white paper unbidden, in all their Compressed Complexity!

And at yet other times, it required magical, mysterious navigational devices to find my way to the studio, like the Ancient Mariners  textile art of yore.

It’s been two and a half years of injuries and transitions (Damn that cursed, black ice!), surgeries, wheel chairs, walkers, canes, learning to walk again, selling and buying houses, all kinds of therapy: physical and otherwise, burying dogs, and trying to get some peace and continuity back into my daily life and studio life, making textile art…which are, truthfully, one and the same. Holy Toledo, it has been hard and remains pretty daunting at times. It was a whole lot of change compressed into a very short time! To paraphrase some old politician or another:

But still I persist!

Large bodies of work continued to expand slowly, new groups of drawing hatched from angry, confused, passionate need and new ways of stitching grew out of curiosity.  Was it smooth sailing?  NO WAY! Making new work took all the energy I had…ALL OF IT.  It was hard.  Many times I doubted that I could continue to be a professional artist. The usual easy flow of creativity was absent.  Instead work felt stilted, hobbled like my mobility, cracked and broken-up into discreet, disconnected episodes of activity!

I persisted.

Everyday, if even for only 5 minutes I returned to the studio.

It was a grind!

During all of this, I did continue exhibiting pretty easily as I was planned a year ahead.  Then the crunch time hit and I had to ask for more help.  My marketing guys at Faceless Marketing kept my name alive, getting me loads of podcast gigs, keeping up my social media  and in the last six months they have pivoted some of their focus to finding exhibitions for me.

But NOW…

two and a half years into this

I might have my Mojo Back!

Suddenly, around two weeks ago, creativity came flowing back into the studio. Something clicked when I spent my two weeks on the Northshore, AKA Lake Superior, for the first time in 2 years. Everyday I walked on the Temperance River paved path, building up to a mile.  I never made it to the falls, but I was ecstatic with my progress.  I read 5 books.  Stared at the lake. Got acupuncture.  Wandered around Grand Marais. Visited with friends. Cooked good food.  Drank pretty good wine. Got a gazillion bug bites. And stitched.  I experimented with new ways to layer and build color effects.  I began to add paint and gesso. I developed a new way to make lace.  I layered shapes in transparent layers that seem to POP-OFF the flat surface.

Ease and elasticity returned to my creative muscles.

These pieces of textile art, Cell Studies, were designed in the cabin and brought home to run on the big machine.  I modulated the saturations with black gesso and india ink, as needed.  They somehow relate to the Neotectonic Series  and will end up in that section of the website.  They are sort of ethereal, spacey, watery, like highly magnified single cell lifeforms.  And, they are also, sort of like patches!  They are each between 6 and 9 inches in diameter.

This is the first of a rather sizeable collection of transparent stitchings…that seem to be holographically three dimensional.  Slowly, they will get finished!

(Gotta get my band saw serviced! I need it to work for this series!)

Gambling on the Climate 1

The first of a sizeable series that uses laser engraved “game boards”,  three dimensional “game pieces” and lots of embroidery  that , in this case, is modified with black gesso and fluid acrylics.  It all takes so much time.

My mobility is not great, but it is improving.  The broken leg still hurts and requires a cane to relieve the pain and reduce the limp. The new hip is less cranky by the day.  The second cataract will be removed by and by and the carpal tunnel in my wrist will be released in September.

But, YES!  I think I might have my mojo back!

Exhibitions in 2024-25

2025         Neotectonics, (solo)Watermark Art Center,Bemidji, MN

                  Innovations in Materials and Color, (solo) Octagon Center for the Arts, Ames, IA

2024        Drawing from Perception, Invention, and Memory, Wright State University, Dayton, OH

                  Viewpoints, Studio Montclair Leach Gallery, Montclair, NJ

                  Toys and Joys, Exhibitzone online

                  Collage Now 2024, Debise Bibro Fine art, New York, NY  online

                  Of the Earth:Climate Change/A Future with Hope, Northrup King Building, Minneapolis, MN

                 360 Degrees-Looking at the Last Year, D’art Gallery, Denver, CO

                 Nature’s Palette, online, Women’s Caucus for Art

                Textile Study Group of New York, Spring Gallery, online

                Women Artists Making Their Mark, juried by Donna Seager and Priscilla Otani, O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, CA, online

Life is GOOD!