10 Questions with Susan Hensel

Susan Hensel received her BFA from the University of Michigan in 1972 with a double major in painting and sculpture and a concentration in ceramics. Her continued studies include Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Penland, Christie's Education, and Praxis Center for Aesthetic Studies, among others. She has a history, to date, of well over 300 exhibitions, 38 of them solo, 28 garnering awards. Upcoming, Susan has 2-person and group exhibitions scheduled with the Howard County Art Council, Ellicot, MD, Artistry, Bloomington, MN, and the Garrett Museum of Art, Garrett, Indiana.

Hensel's artwork is known and collected nationwide, represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute with major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, University of Washington, Baylor University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition, archives pertaining to her artist's books are available at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle.

Her new innovative work that blends commercial embroidery processes with sculptural concerns is gaining attention and awards in the US with inroads into Europe. Susan's knowledge of materials allows her to create small to large-scale hard-edge sculptures from soft fabrics that paradoxically keep their crisp form with minimal armatures. In addition, her knowledge of the physics of color allows her to create shape-shifting displays employing the special reflective characteristics of embroidery thread.  
In recent years Hensel has been awarded multiple grants and residencies through the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Ragdale Foundation.

Hensel's curatorial work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan, with the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery in Minneapolis. The Susan Hensel Gallery continues on Artsy.net as an online project promoting Midwest artists with a particular interest in materiality. Hensel has curated over eighty exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists from all over the United States and Canada.  

www.susanhenselprojects.com | @susan_hensel_multimedia_artist

ARTIST STATEMENT

Susan Hensel makes sculptural textile works from a feminist perspective to transform personal experience, private and public spaces, and notions of beauty through the alchemy of color, scale, lighting, and placement. She combines mixed-media practices with fabric and embroidery across digital and manual platforms. As a 50-year career established artist, she feels called to use her time and talents in the service of transformation – both her own as an artist and catalyst for the viewers of her work. Through her work, she aims to ignite a sense of "radical beauty" which is extended to the viewer: an invitation to an experience 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.

At the center of her technical process is digital embroidery: designing in the computer and stitching out on a computer-aided machine. Digital machine embroidery is not a substitute for, nor a speedier version or imitator of, handwork. For Susan Hensel, its use is a mindset as well as a media choice. Historically, flatness is a key characteristic of most embroidery, with occasional low-relief techniques employed. Her work breaks ground by engaging both sculptural and cultural space. Susan Hensel designs the work to be permanently folded, making art that can be manipulated and performed, containers that can be moved to create a sense of place, free-standing sculpture, installations, and large-scale wall works that claim space and define it. She is not imitating fashion, quilts, or hand embroidery. Rather, she uses thread and fiber techniques to shift light and perception through structures and forms in the real world. By doing so, she brings digital embroidery out of the industrial and applied art realm into the fine art space.

Embroidery thread is trilobal in structure. It bends light in multiple directions. Since all color is reflected light, when the angle of reflection changes, so does the perception of color. The finished works dance in the fields of color perception while demonstrating process and movement in otherwise static forms. Susan Hensel explores size and three-dimensionality, from tabletop to architectural scale. 

Digital embroidery lends itself to hard-edge geometry as well as biomorphic form. The combination of high-tech with what historically has been considered "women's handiwork" provides a holistic contrast of hard/soft, nostalgic/current, objective/subjective. It also lends itself to modular repetition and recombinations. Themes can be played out quickly in the computer and then stitched and sampled everso-slowly on the machine – combined with and without mixed media in a wide-ranging exploration of forms in space.

In this chaotic time, digital textiles seem like a way to begin to bring order to the world. Order is, however, always unstable, a glimmer of hope, cut off by random acts of chance or intent. It is no different in digital embroidery. In the computer, all things seem orderly, put together, and logical, as though the human propensity for chaos did not exist. In production, chance operates human error, flawed thread, broken needles, run out bobbins, high humidity, low humidity, fabric popping out of hoops, and the panicked phone call from a friend. Repair savvy, canny attention, and a spirit of wabi-sabi is essential. 

Susan Hensel's art can be situated within a history of women artists whose work received art world recognition later in their careers. Starting with Judy Chicago, who struggled for decades to place the world-famous Dinner Party (1974), comprised of multi-media artwork of hand-painted china, ceramics, and embroidery (finally bought in 2002 and housed at the Sackler Feminist Art Center at the Brooklyn Museum). Other textile artists working in sculptural forms, such as the late Ruth Asawa, worked and taught, like me, for decades before major institutional and art world recognition. Indeed, the work of women's crafts has only recently been positioned within contemporary art history, as showcased in the 2015 Museum of Arts and Design's Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft and Design, Mid-Century and Today. Susan Hensel's foremothers and contemporaries are many: Sheila Hicks, Polly Apfelbaum, Anne Wilson, Lenore Tawney – artists who all stretched the definitions of how fiber "should" be understood.

Could you tell us a little more about your background, and how did you begin making art?

Evidently, I have been an artist since the day I picked up a pencil and drew on the wall. I grew up in a college town in upstate New York where museums and galleries were few, but exposure to art was still fairly high through books and travel. I studied at the University of Michigan, attaining a BFA with a double major in sculpture and painting and a minor in ceramics. While my medium of choice has varied through the years, a few key aspects are always present: a strong focus on materiality and process and a concern with how art can effect change.

What are you trying to communicate with your art?

Currently, I am working with a concept that I call "radical beauty." I am heavily influenced by the writings of John O'Donohue on beauty. My goal is to create works that overwhelm with color and stop people n their tracks. By stopping, looking, taking a deep breath, they can overcome quotidian cares, if only for a moment, and return to their lives refreshed. It's not about pretty things, although they may, indeed, be pretty. It is about something more profound and hard to express with words. It is helping to provide the healing experience of awe. This is accomplished through the use of color, scale, and placement in the space.

You have been quoted, "I make sculptural textile works from a feminist perspective to transform personal experience, private and public spaces, and notions of beauty..." Can you tell our readers what experience of your life is reflected in your works of art?

As a female artist, educated in the 1960s, a sculpture major, there were many roadblocks thrown in the road before me. Women were forbidden from using table saws, lathes, routers, planers… thus limiting our technical scope. Professors would refuse to teach women, walking away as we asked questions. Professors would say that we women would graduate, have babies and never make art again.

Of course, I became a feminist! Everything I do pushes against that time period when I was in training. I think of the actually wonderful professor who told me to work small because I am a small woman. A portable mural of 8' x 54' (2.4 meters x 16.5 meters) is now in a permanent public collection. I think of the actually OK professor who predicted I would cease to make art. Here I am 50 years later, still vibrant and productive. And, yes, I married and had a child and still made art.

I also have always been process-oriented and thematically driven. I have spent years making installations with political content—years working with essentialist, vulvar imagery. And now years pushing textiles into three-dimensional space.

Why do you use this textile language?

As a sculptor, I always try to choose the "right" medium for what I am doing. 

The fact is that these particular textile processes are especially suited to the study of color and light. The thread that I use is trilobal. That means that its cross-section is basically triangular. When light is reflected from this thread, it scatters in up to three directions. All color is a function of reflected light. When the angle of reflection shifts, so does our perception of color. This makes for a particularly vibrant surface with even one color. When I combine two or more colors of threads, the perception is of many more colors than the numbers of threads. As you walk past one of my pieces, the colors will appear to change because the angle of reflection to your eye changes.

The combination of high tech with "women's work" provides a delicious contrast of hard/soft, nostalgic/current, objective/non-objective. It also lends itself to modular repetition and re-combinations. Themes can be played out quickly in the computer and then stitched and sampled oh so slowly on the machine, combined with and without mixed media in a wide-ranging exploration of forms in space.  

What is your creative process like?

My process is dominantly intuitive, which may seem odd since I rely so heavily on computers and computer-aided embroidery machines.

The series you see here came out of a self-designed residency several summers ago. I sequester myself in a cabin for at least two weeks every year to study and get in touch with the core of my work. I spent that residency experimenting with the movement of color and how to take the work into three dimensions. By playing with small color samples, I understood viscerally how the angle of reflection affected color. I also understood that if I could establish curves and folds in space, wondrous color effects could be more predictably controlled. My research took me back to paper folding, which I had studied around 20 years ago. I began to make small paper models that were adjusted to handle the limitations of the fabric. And one thing led to another… as it still does.

 A key aspect of what I do is actually watch the stitch-outs. Sometimes I will see a form or a color combination that I did not see before, and I will stop the machine to use the fabric as is,  or I will go to the computer and design a new piece based on what I see. Sometimes, in the more pictorial pieces, stitch collage is employed. For instance, I will finish stitching out a design and realize it needs something more. So I digitize the needed "something more" and stitch it into the existing piece.

Both failed stitch-outs, and successful stitch-outs suggest new directions, new ideas, and new urgencies to see more! I work modularly. I put together identical modules to make larger objects or to create environments. I also resize modules or cut and reassemble modules to create new permutations and combinations of color and form.

I thoroughly enjoy tools and technology! I have been working with computers as part of my administration and art process since I was a teenager! I enjoy the design process in the computer as well as the ineffable, intuitive process on the computer-aided embroidery machines. Trust me, what you put into the machines may or may not be what you get in the end! There are so many variables, choices, machine glitches, and weather changes that affect the outcomes.

What for you is the most enjoyable part of your art?

I LOVE designing the pieces on the computer. 

I LOVE playing with the color combinations.

I LOVE the problem solving.

I LOVE working with tools.

I LOVE seeing the works finished.

( I don't love all the ironing, though.)

Who are the textile sculptors you admire the most?

What I am doing is new to the field. My admired foremothers work across media in their practice. I study the work of Polly Apfelbaum for her use of color, process, and repetition and Marina Abakanowicz and Sheila Hicks for their sculptural excellence. These three women are powerful sculptors who are not limited by their choice of textiles. They are sculptors first, textiles workers incidentally.

What was the art lesson you learned from last year's experience?

What a hard year! ALL my exhibitions were delayed or canceled and remain problematic at best. After much study, dithering, and writing, I determined several things:

• first seek pleasure in this dire time

• embrace new technologies to stay in touch with people

• reach out to collaborate with new people across the globe

• art is more important than ever

• play with your materials to make new discoveries

• take your work online. It is a larger part of our future than before pandemic and upheaval.

• always show up in the studio

What are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future?

I am working on a series called Chromatic Bookblocks. It is a long series of discreet, identically sized sculptures that study how three identical colors of thread shift their chroma based on the fabric's color.

There are ten so far, and it will finish at 20, with these colors of thread: royal blue, aqua, and ochre. Each block is 72-80 embroideries, folded, pressed, drilled with a sailmaker's bit, and secured on threaded rods under pressure. As objects, they are so satisfying to handle. I may continue this as an ongoing series with new colors of thread! Time will tell!

Finally, Share something you would like the world to know about you?

The story of how I came to digital embroidery: This is a State Fair Love Story

I moved to Minneapolis roughly 18 years ago. A feature of Minnesota is the State Fair. It is called the Great Minnesota Get Together. I had never seen anything like it! It is huge and crowded and if it's not too hot, fun.

One year I determined to go to the Demonstration Building, where merchants try to convince you to buy their new, marvelous products! One of the merchants was a sewing machine provider. They had all kinds of consumer-grade machines for dressmaking and mending. But, in the center of their booth, there was a machine stitching out, automatically, a Donald Duck. I was totally uninterested in the Donald Duck character or the fact that the machine was stitching hands-free. I was mesmerized by the most beautiful blue I had ever seen! I determined then and there that I must possess this capability.

Eventually, I got a loan for my first machine and received a grant to purchase and learn the digitizing software. Now, many years later, I have a larger "crossover" machine that will stitch up to 11" (28cm) wide and a much larger commercial machine that will stitch up to 48" (122cm) wide.