Anyone for Entropy?| Radical Beauty in Loss | Susan Hensel Textile Art As time passes, and things in and around us degrade and begin to fall apart, I seek the inherent beauty in it all! Experience Radical Beauty in Loss: The good lord knows that none of us escape our own end…. […]
Lambent Journey Tools | New work| Susan Hensel Projects I just finished a new iteration growing out of the Neotectonic series It is always curious to me how things happen to become. As a sculptor, I am materially oriented. I first think of materials and what each can do. Can it bend? Can it fold? Can it hold its shape? What happens if I make it bigger? what happens if I make it smaller? How about pink? How about another color? How can I incorporate it, whatever it might be? Does it need metal? Plumbing parts? And then, only then, do I wonder what it is saying to me! […]
“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. […]
The Ancient Mariner Awakes | New work | Susan Hensel Projects February 5, 2024, during the winter that did not arrive in Minnesota! Life is a strange thing, de-stabilizing at times. Whole swaths of time can fly by un-noticed. I heard on the radio this morning that that sudden awareness of lost time, like the morning commute finishing fast, is evidence of a state of flow. (Yes, I suppose, but, God forbid, it could be a black-out as well!) Sure, sometimes it is a creative time. But sometimes it really is a lost time, perhaps a hibernation; a period of regrouping, of reconsideration…maybe even a paradigm shift. […]
New Art, New Exhibitions, New Life At Susan Hensel Projects a meandering post about what’s up now? The leaves are bright and falling from the trees in brisk, sunny, windy gusts and maybe even slush by the end of the week! Where on earth did the time go? New art, new exhibitions, new life at Susan Hensel projects. Well, truth be told, it went to setting up a new home and studio, going to physical therapy, and…yes…RETURNING TO NEAR FULL TIME STUDIO WORK! […]
How do things become? or what does the creative process look like? How do things become? I thought you might like to see “the process” of becoming for a new work of art. As I return to the studio full time, my creativity is waking up. It’s pretty stiff and creaky, like the broken parts of my body. But, also like my body, it knitting back together. I am playing with stitch outs from “Before the Fall!” (As in broken leg, not Adam and Eve in the Garden.) When I fell on the ice 6 months ago, there was one large, multi part piece in process awaiting a wood armature and a small wayfinder awaiting finely shaped maple. I ordered the maple, perhaps the day before “The Fall.” It arrived while I was in rehab. There were enough modules stitched to make the large piece larger or manipulate some of them into something else, while I await the completion of the woodshop. […]
Finding your way takes persistence and maybe a few wayfinding devices. Finding your way takes persistence and maybe a few wayfinding devices. It is easy to get myopic in the studio. We artists tend to get caught up in the details: each blade of grass offers an opportunity to linger. And then…there are the droplets of dew!!! Oh My! It is all so beautiful! Awe inspiring! I could gaze at it forever! Such GREEN! Green is a hard color to work with…what am I gonna’ do? Is it going to be a painting? Where’s the canvas? Or shall I stitch it? Maybe beads? OOPS! I forgot what I was doing! […]
Titles Are Weird Things New Work Titles are weird things. I make new work all the time. Sometimes I know, right from the beginning, what the title of the work will be. But, more often than not, the finished piece takes time to reveal itself. Sometimes the piece is withholding and it takes help to find the title. That was the case with this piece. I knew that the piece was talking about weather changes, ocean currents, magnetic poles...all kinds of climate change things! The oceans are key to our survival even as they rise and consume our shorelines and, in concert with rising temperatures, create huge, destructive storms. My imagery was based on weather maps, navigation maps, longitude lines coming together at the poles, movement that seemed to whirl on the edge of chaos. I started brainstorming: Mapping Currents Heat Maps Mapping Time Change Map None of those were right. When Sarah came to work, we brainstormed together: Change Sutra Climate Sutra Topographical Sutra We talked about the function of a title in my abstract art. I use titles to give clues to my thinking, to open up questions in the viewer so they can ask their [...]
Making a new artwork! Chromatic Wave 3 at Susan Hensel Projects There is a lot that goes into making any artwork. I thought I’d take you behind the scenes again. I wanted to see what would happen if I up-sized Chromatic Wave 1, Chromatic Wave 3 was just finished last week. Chromatic Wave 1 is only 24 ” w. Chromatic Wave 3 is 77″ tall! Architectural in scale. The digitizing took an afternoon. The stitching took about two days. The cutting, sewing and ironing took another day. At this scale, movement of the pleats into new forms was limited to the triple curve. […]
Genesis of an Artwork Nothing Wasted at Susan Hensel Projects Artworks come from various sources…including failure! Experimentation and intuition are key-words for Susan Hensel Projects. Genesis of an Artwork. When people visit the studio and see me at work, they are often astounded. They expect that everything I do is strictly mechanical…that I design the artwork in the computer and then let the embroidery machine do its thing…turning out perfect, completed hands-free objects every time. Boy oh boy! That hardly ever, if ever, happens! Let me take you through how Solar Tide came to be. You will be astounded, too. […]
