The Work

My studio work challenges orthodox conceptions of landscape representation, and the ways of seeing they encode. Artistic processes encode ways of seeing. My process of visual discovery de-mystifies these ways of seeing.

Formally my work is a hybrid of sculpture and drawing. By using two-dimensional devices in a three-dimensional context, illusory space converges with real space, and space becomes place. Orizonte, my piece for Walker Art Center, incorporates drawing devices, shading and 3-point perspective, to create an illusion of landscape. Though hung in straight lines, the grey dyed fabric appears to bow outward in the center creating an ambiguous sense of space.

The surveyor’s transit and plane table are tools that, in the process of describing the land, changed its form. Though the easel and palette have also influenced change, the constructed wilds of the 18th century English estates, seem small and isolated, when compared to the vast-scale democratic grid of the American Midwest. My slate Plane Tables are meditations on this land, its peoples and the environment.

My public art projects are both site and culturally specific, designed to function as a locus of community identity and as ongoing transmitters of cultural information. I often work on sites where social misbehavior is the norm. I have discovered that as I organize space to become place, behavior changes. Place making is the focus of my public work.

Susan Fiene