Susan Hensel
Susan Hensel creates work that blends commercial embroidery processes with sculptural concerns, creating small to large-scale hard-edge sculptures from soft fabrics that paradoxically keep their crisp form with minimal armatures. Her knowledge of the physics of colour allows her to create shape-shifting displays employing the special reflective characteristics of embroidery thread.
She shares, “I make sculptural textile work, transforming personal experience, private and public spaces, and notions of beauty, through the alchemy of colour, scale, lighting and placement. I combine mixed-media practices with fabric and embroidery across digital and manual platforms. With a 50-year career, I provide an experience which invites viewers to a place of wonder and meditation. Using a minimal number of colours and basic techniques, I create sparkling, changeable rainbows. I exploit the physics of light as it interacts with
the structure of the triangular embroidery thread.”
Hensel has a history, to date, of more than 300 exhibitions, 35 of them solo, twenty plus garnering awards.