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.
Ancient Mariner 4
The ANCIENT MARINER series is a paradigm shift, I think. It is not based on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner….a storm tossed, guilt ridden story/poem. It is an outgrowth of climate anxiety, the WAYFINDER series, and health upheavals. As California floods and mudslides disastrously under an Atmospheric River (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_river), as my body heals and breaks and heals and breaks…I keep making handheld wayfinders…based on the idea of ancient navigational instruments, like the astrolabe. But in this “winterless” season of winter and chaos, more was required! I sought out more ancient ways to find order: rituals, celestial diviations. Perhaps the ancients had spells to share.
Sorry! My ancient divination devices did not change anything.
It’s still raining in California. It’s still 50 degrees in Minnesota in February. I still moved home and studio. I still caught Covid. The political election season still moves on. My leg is healed. My hip is not. And I am still making art that will hopefully allow us all to slow down a bit and find a moment of peace in the center of the storm that is life.
The paradigm shift comes from mining my ancient skills. I am well known as a textile/mixed media sculptor, calling on my skills in multiple media, as most sculptors do. But I was also trained as a painter! In fact, my academic years included a double major: one in painting and one in sculpture. So I have been resurrecting my rusty skills with the brush!
About Susan Hensel
Susan Hensel is a multidisciplinary artist, with a 50+ year career, who combines a mixed media practice with embroidery across digital and manual platforms. Additionally. Susan makes sculpture and wall art using the colors and techniques of commercial embroidery, designed on the computer and stitched out on the computer-aided embroidery machine with the aim to create an experience for the viewer that overwhelms with color, transcends the quotidian and 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 find the beauty and the structure of embroidery thread qualitatively unique. It also deals in optical color perception but 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.”
