Insider ~ Outside

Sue’s artwork defies easy categorization.  She is a trained artist, yet her visual tendencies and her vibrant  energy are reflective of a seminal native impetus that is not studied, or  bound by training. She is ‘neoteric’, that is, she freshly taps deeply rooted   subconscious drives in her relentless exploration of media and subject matter. She finds the mundane inspirational and expresses it in wonderful, playful explosion of forms, colors, carvings and energy that manifest as imaginative magical artscapes.

What makes Sue so unique, as an artist, is her multiple layering of two and three-dimensional forms uniquely amalgamated into discordant wholes that resist and, in a sense, pugnaciously defy interpretation. Kinetic energy is rampant in the assorted juxtaposing of colors and forms and this energy is not systematically managed, but nuanced, or perhaps “compelled” into workable themes that impress with shear enthusiasm.

The range of her genre, over the years, has included large-scale assemblage pieces, semi-naturalistic drawings, highly fractured pieces, and carved, scratched and grooved canvas that exhibits generative power—her canvases are alive. Unlike most artists, her range is not limited by style, but develops out of her relentless drive to create and recreate fundamental forms, shapes, colors, and subconscious imagery in an unlimited kaleidoscope of creative expressions. Nature and the exploration of mind are her principle inspirations, and from these emerge an uninhibited outburst of art.

Her photography by contrast is much more temperate. At least superficially, this seems to appear to be the case. But Sue’s modus operandi is not to overlay subject matter in an interpretive framework, but rather to let her subjects speak for themselves. The style is not interpretive, but a visual interview approach, where a whole life-story is captured in a single moment. The interpretation only happens between the viewer and the subject, the photographer is simply a means to that end—a recorder of history through light. As such, a viewer is invited, on a very immediate and personal level to relate to the subject portrayed. As in her paintings, it is the nakedness, the purity of experience that is paramount—the sheer looking into a subject’s eyes and envisioning wholly their life story.