A textile artist with over 35 years’ experience, Susan creates exquisite one-off pieces. Susan’s expertise in shibori, botanical contact printing, stitch and fabric collage sees her create wearables, accessories, and fine art works. In her Gondwana SLOW Textile studio in the Byron Bay hinterland, Susan is regularly excited by magical processes and glorious colour from nature rather than chemicals, a direct response to nature. Her sculptures are sometimes created from 3.5m of silk organza, involving up to 2000 stitches, in processes of Mokume and Arashi Shibori, before being dyed.
When Susan completed a Masters of Visual Arts at Monash University in 2006, she awarded the Post Graduate residency in Prato Tuscany.
Specialising in around 12 eucalyptus species (of Australia’s 900 ), her studio investigations, in collaboration with research scientists at Southern Cross Plant Science – Southern Cross University Lismore, have led to unparalleled knowledge about dyeing with leaves of eucalyptus.
Invited to present her work at prestigious international conferences, Susan speaks about the abundance and diversity of eucalypts in Australia and application in contemporary textiles.
Most recently, in Antananarivo Madagascar, ‘The UNESCO International Festival of Plants Ecology and Colour” saw scientists, writers, academics, dye experts, artists and traditional practitioners share research around economics and science of dyes from nature, traditional culture and issues of environmental impact of synthetic dyes.
Complex chemistry of indigo dyeing processes, has seen Susan peering into deep generational dye vats in remote places, where expertise of elders is holding to a thin thread of textile traditions. Her studio usually has a natural indigo vat flowering , and dyeing glorious blues.
Byron Shire
