Bio

Susie grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and moved to Chicago to study painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating, she established an artists’ run work/gallery space where artists could work, share, grow, encourage, and support one another. She became interested in accessory design, took up metalsmithing and started a jewelry business. She further honed her skill set in the area of accessory design and construction through the Accessory Design Program at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in NYC with a focus on handbags. Upon finishing her degree at FIT she got a job with the luxury handbag designer Carlos Falchi in NYC. Susie later moved back to Chicago to start a family. She currently lives in Chicago with her husband and her two daughters. After taking an 18-year hiatus from painting and drawing, she has recently felt compelled to utilize art making as a healing modality from an Environmental Illness as well as motivated by my daughters to provide them with a positive female model of living a creative life while mothering.

Statement

I create work in order to further support a revised rendition of my encounter with the environment and encourage my path to healing from trauma and Environmental Illness. In my pieces, flora, fauna, and humans are transported to a cosmos filled with bright colors and shapes that dance through space. While often fragile, isolated, and in a state of fight, flight or fright, these beings are embraced in settings of rapturous delight.

Immersing oneself into this world, the viewer can participate in a reality that is steeped in wonder and allure; free from struggle and uneasiness. Forms, patterns, and repeated marks portray the captivating neuronal loops and patterns that become implanted in the brain dictating the story of the protagonist. Scratchy and scribbly lines are contrasted with graceful lines depicting the different energies each character radiates. Smooth, delicate continuous lines summon calmness, hope, and continuity. Strong solid lines lines beckon the viewer to recall the raw innate desire for survival inherent to each entity. However, combined with hunger for continuity of life is the desire for all living things to not merely exist, but to thrive.

Conceiving this amended version of relating to the environment allows me as the maker to engage in re writing a narrative that actively sooths my nervous system as well as changes neural pathways enabling myself to not only to heal; but to bloom and flourish. My hope is for the viewer to have a similar encounter when stepping into my pieces.