We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Susan Hensel a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Susan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your career and how did you resolve those issues?

Sometimes, the vicissitudes of living in a human body can overwhelm your creative work life.

Case in point: I had what I now refer to as “a series of unfortunate events,” spanning three and a half years that put me in a wheelchair for a while and forced a studio/home safety move! It started with spontaneous tendon tears, followed by a serious ice accident and a subsequent joint replacement to regain near-total mobility.

I was a full-time artist who suddenly became a full-time patient!

The good news was that I had at least a full year of exhibitions lined up and friends to help me. But that wasn’t enough.

I have always been productive and forward-leaning in my studio. I routinely, if somewhat erratically, send out exhibition proposals. So I was pretty well set initially. But, full-time “patienting” really zaps your energy and productive capacity. So I asked my marketing team to switch their focus to finding exhibitions for me. In recovery, I found I could either be creative occasionally or seek exhibitions…but not both. It was a learning curve for all of us. The team I have been working with on a contract basis for several years was unfamiliar with the caliber of exhibitions I sought. As they were learning those ropes, they found a series of interviews and podcasts for me to keep my brand alive. Hooray!

Meanwhile, when I wasn’t having surgery and going to physical therapy of various sorts, I was drawing, making miniature books, journaling, and shopping for a one-story house with a full walk-out basement to accommodate the studio. It was an actual panic move! My beloved studio/gallery/home in my beloved neighborhood was 108 years old, three working stories, with my bed at the top. I quickly realized that I could not get out if there were a fire!

In a month or two, I found an appropriate property, sold mine, and moved in—barely able to walk yet on a hospital walker!

And yet, I created. It was absolutely essential that I continued to make art, just as it was absolutely essential that I did all the PT, not knowing if I would ever independently walk again.

But even that was not exactly enough to get through the long, drawn-out healing process. So, I looked at what had been working in the studio on and off in my more than 50-year career as an artist: teamwork.

I have always assembled small teams of workers for specific projects. The project this time was to get me as healthy and mobile as possible so I could continue my life as an artist. I expanded the team to include spiritual guidance, a social worker for psychological advice, and two highly specialized body workers. Eventually, I got strong enough to stand at the embroidery machines, get a dog (My new beloved!), and hire an assistant again to help me move on to the next part of my career.

After 3.5 years spent rebuilding and re-creating my body, I am working full time in the studio, creating modest-sized artworks, walking without assistive devices most of the time, accepting commissions, and exhibiting both nationally and internationally.

Susan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am known as a maker of profoundly beautiful textile sculptures. I create designs in a specialized embroidery computer program, output them on a computer-aided embroidery machine, and combine them with any and all mixed media as desired.

For as long as I can remember, creating material things has been as life-giving as breathing. The world is full of interesting sights, sounds, and scents, just waiting to be discovered, considered, and interpreted. The materials are all around us, just waiting for us to discern the interconnectedness of all things and form meaning from those realizations!

My career as an artist spans many years and materials! I sold my first artwork as a teenager and never looked back! There was never any question that I would keep making art, keep studying art, keep dreaming art…and here I am at least 60 years later.

My professional training at the University of Michigan was in sculpture as well as painting, with minors in ceramics, art history, and psychology. I came out with my curiosity intact and my skills with materials just beginning to develop! I trained in all sorts of tactile materials…except textiles! Textiles were not considered relevant at the university at that time. But, like most women my age, I had been exposed as a child to various techniques: knitting, crochet, and hand embroidery. Most of my life, textiles remained in the background as something to be enjoyed, but not necessarily as fine art.

Textiles became a more serious focus after I moved to Minnesota twenty-two years ago. There is a vibrant arts community here: painting, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, performance, clay, dance, music! I became involved with the Textile Center and the Weavers Guild, studying intensely how thread and yarn are made. NERDY! But the magic of the very fibers twisted together captivated me. The twist made fragile little hairs and bits of fluff strong. The colors were affected by the direction and tightness of the twist, the combination of plies, the breed of sheep, plant, or camelid. I wasn’t as interested in what I could make with the yarns and threads I made…they were interesting objects in their own right.

It was clear to me, as a Minnesota transplant, that it is almost a “requirement of citizenship” to go to the Minnesota State Fair. So I went! And that is where I discovered machine embroidery. There was a sea of machines stitching out cartoon characters, hands free. I was captivated! It was not the characters nor the automation that captured me. It was the color, unlike anything I had ever seen! The bluest, ultramarine blue!

I knew I was in trouble! Many grants and loans later, I am an expert on the fringes of this field of digital textiles! These machines are used for garments, monograms, ball caps, varsity jackets, and teddy bears. NOT for sculptural art. But when I saw that blue, I knew there was something there that I needed to learn. I could almost see a new way to use these machines, new ways to think about programming them, new ways to develop deep, rich, sculptural surfaces. ALMOST!

But I have arrived, after much study, much testing, and lots of failures at the bleeding edge of what these textiles can accomplish. The work is not hands-off, nor does the computer create it. I design, stitch by stitch, layer by layer, sometimes 150 layers or more, fabrics designed to structurally bend and fold into sculptural forms that also bend and distort light. The created fabrics are bent, scrunched, wet-formed, heat-formed into the shape they were destined for, combined with whatever is necessary to complete them! All my painting, collaging, and woodworking skills come into play.

In the last few years, these works of art, exhibited both nationally and internationally, have focused on themes related to climate change. They use the trope of radical beauty to invite people into contemplation of how we wish the world to be, to help us imagine a future that might just be possible if we love the earth and one another enough.

I also, from time to time, accept commercial design commissions that look quite different! Commercially, the colors desired are often more muted. I am becoming a “specialist” in beige and blue. These works can be modest or large, depending on the space I am working with. They tend toward a simpler geometry. This should come as no surprise when you think deeply about thread and stitches as I nerdily do! One of the basic ideas I learned in high school geometry was that a line, any finite line, is comprised of two points connected by a line. Hmmm…THAT A STITCH!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I can tell you that I am freaking tired of being SO RESILIENT! But, boy, am I glad to be so! As my intro described, the last three and a half years have been a challenging exercise in resilience! Like any life, ANY LIFE, there are hard times we need to deal with. This one was a particularly long stretch of hard.

For years, people have remarked not only on my productivity but also on my resilience…as though I had some super power. I was born with a pretty crummy skeleton that has required years of recovery, even before the “series of unfortunate events.” I was widowed young with a very young child. And, of course, there have been the loves lost, deaths of friends and families, and untoward decisions with lousy outcomes. I am a human being. We are prone to all manner of stupid, upsetting things.

So what saves me and my work? My personality is pretty optimistic, but that only gets you so far. Every day, I get to choose to learn from my life. Finding a useful “way through it all” is a daily choice. Recovery doesn’t often happen automatically or by chance. It takes observation, persistence, and work.

Like many artists, I am also solitary by nature. Time alone in my studio is a precious gift. But as comforting and salvitic as making the art is for me, I have learned that I also NEED A TEAM to stay grounded and healthy in the face of what life can throw in your path. I continue to set up systems, friends, and professionals who can support my goals as an artist and a human being. And everyday, EVERYDAY, I make the choice to move forward.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My art practice is genuinely healthy and healing for me. But it also has an outward mission for and to the community.

Everything in our American way of life calls people to speed up, accomplish more, and measure their purpose by their possessions or output.

I see another way.

I am called to use my time and talents in service of transformation; to create art of great beauty that invites people into a pause, for a period or even just a moment of repose, a time to experience, to take a deep breath, to savor what words cannot adequately describe.

Theology tries to describe God. It philosophizes and intellectualizes things that words cannot adequately describe. The philosophy of aesthetics tries to do the same with beauty, yet these things are far too large for mere human language. The perception of beauty, handmade or otherwise, has the potential to provide a transcendent experience for people. A moment when they can purely step out of their egoism into a new way of being that is free.

This is the liminal space within which I try to operate.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://susanhenselprojects.com
• Instagram: susan_hensel_multimedia_artist
• Facebook: susan.hensel1 and SusanHenselProjects