Meet Susan Hensel

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

Hi Susan, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I have had too many opportunities to be resilient! What can I say, “stuff happens!” It is hard being human!

Some of the garbage of living is from personal choices that blow up on you. You clean it up. Admit your part in whatever happened, apologise and, this is key, forgive yourself, work on self-awareness and move on. Holding on to the guilt and anger can destroy you.

But most of my resilience comes from figuring out how to deal with the unexpected tragedies and accidents
through story.

My husband was killed in an auto accident nearly 40 years ago. I remember sitting on the couch with the priest as the police officer played with my 2 year old and thinking, “This does not have to kill me, it can anneal me!” I proceeded to develop a mythology, a self story, that has supported me over the years.

The story is: I have needed to be strong, so strong, in fact, that I needed to wear a steel corset. The backstory is that I have a congenital disorder that weakened my back and I really was wearing a steel-boned corset! As the years proceeded, I had more opportunities to expand this story through other life challenges. I needed to be so strong that not only did I wear a steel boned corset, but then I needed more strength and had the steel (titanium, actually) inserted in my back.

And that metaphorically and actually strong back has supported me through multiple surgeries, family deaths, and my own devastating accidents. While certainly I was a victim of random chance, I chose to focus more on my strength than my weakness. I did not want to be defined by the story of loss,but rather by the story of survival.

It’s a daily choice.

Change your story, change your life.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I deal in the radical power of beauty.

That is a rather bold statement that I came to after reading BEAUTY: THE INVISIBLE EMBRACE by John O’Donahue. Among the things I took away from him was the sly, sublime power of beauty to change us. It has been my goal as an artist, throughout a multimedia career spanning more than fifty years, to create opportunities for people to pause, slow down, and experience moments of awe. In these moments, however brief, there is an opportunity to “be present”, without the pressure of ego, ambition or urgency and then return to the work at hand refreshed. You might think of it as a mini-sabbath, a micro-vacation.

How do I do this? I create textile and multimedia sculptures using digital embroidery and a knowledge of color interaction and a smattering of the physics of light. I create intense, mysterious color interactions that stop people in their tracks!

Digital embroidery is the stuff you see on letter jackets, ball caps and uniforms. It was developed for the fashion and monogram industry as well as the home hobbyist. The artwork is designed in a specialized program in the computer that is a non-intuitive cross between Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. When I saw one of these machines in action at the Minnesota State Fair I was mesmerised by the intensity of the color. I had to possess it! And I had to learn how to draw with stitches in these specialized programs.

Through intense research and experimentation I discovered that the common polyester embroidery thread is roughly triangular in cross=section That was a lightbulb moment! I remembered a tiny bit of high school science about prisms bending light and that the angle of the bend determined the color! THAT was why the color was so intense. Because the light was bouncing off a basically triangular structure, various shades of, say, BLUE, would reflect off a single thread…creating intensity and sparkle! I was off and running.

I applied this knowledge and began working with various color relationships on folded designs to create a color experience that is reminiscent of lenticular lenses. When you walk by one of mt pieces, the color will seem to shift and change!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Let your curiosity Lead the way Keep Learning
Show up, daily, in your place of work/studio.

I wake up every morning ready to return to the studio after breakfast and exercise. I SHOW UP! 6 days per week. I am not always productive. I never create PERFECTION. While what I do is important to me, and I trust, to the world, no one is going to die if I make a lousy piece of art!

Try to stay up to date with the administrative tasks: inventory, photography, resume, artists statements, proposals, marketing outreach, web design. It can eat you alive, but if you have your documents more or less up to date, you can respond quickly and easily to opportunities that arise.

About those opportunities: For most artists, this involves a budget for jury fees. Once you know what you can afford, apply, apply, apply. Multiple applications floating out there are good for you because, little by little, you will learn where you work belongs and little by little you will have a higher acceptance rate and little by little you won’t care as much when the inevitable rejections arrive. That’s how my dear, sensitive, thin skin got thicker!

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?
Dogged Resilience!!!!

More than a year ago I experience a random tendon injury that nearly landed me in a wheelchair, for life! I doggedly did EVERYTHING my multiple therapist prescribed and adjusted my workplace and was more productive than ever!

Just as I was about to be released from therapy, I fell on black ice and broke my femur in 2 places, a severe, complex fracture! I have yet more titanium in me! Six months later I have moved my home and studio to one level, am closer to walking without assistive devices and just beginning to work again!

I go to the studio everyday.

DOGGED RESILIENCE!

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