About

Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 2025, from 6 to 9 pm
The opening reception on June 6 invites all to engage with the art and meet the artists in an inspiring atmosphere. Additionally, the Sunday Artist Talk & Paper Pulping Workshop on June 22 offers a hands-on opportunity to learn about the art of paper pulping and “art composting” directly from Susan Harrison.

We look forward to welcoming you to this colorful celebration of contemporary art.

The Absurdity of making sense

Susan Harrison created this collection of automatic drawings and “manipulated matter” created over three years.  These spontaneous works, my version of Dada (Kurt Schwitter’s Merz), are the result of designing within the constraints of using discarded and limited materials, such as scraps of decorative paper, unwanted composite board, corrugated packaging, cotton rags, encaustic wax, et al. 

I aspire to transform refuse into objects that I value and that represent my joy of discovery and the rich, layered nature of things. My great need is to process material waste into valuable form and find a copacetic arrangement that makes sense using coloring, patterning, layering, structuring, and balancing to alter what is there. It is my version of art alchemy. I glean, sort, and play with cast offs, and degraded materials, attempting to resurrect their value, their faded glory, offering them up, to live one more life on my studio walls.

Imagery is arbitrary to me, a by-product of my mark-making activities, and is secondary to my focus on the mystery, ordering and transforming of daily energy, random marks, and matter. I seek out infrastructure and curious pathways within haphazardly placed elements. Many of the works featuring overlays of India Ink drips represent my improvisational attempts to use my sense of composition to infuse chaos and disorder with structure and balance, as well as to elicit a sense of spirit and wonder.

In turn, the process of making my handmade paper with a Little Critter Hollander beater serves as an act of celebrating the circles of life, growth, and decay. I affirm Being by decomposing and composting my life’s organic matter (cotton sheets, shirts, and so on) into pulp that then gets to live again as new paper tablets -- full of possibility.

Previously I have scanned many of my patterned works into Adobe Photoshop to manipulate to create more complex and polished images printed out on metal. Yet, with these new works, it is the physical effort and hands-on struggle in “real time and space” that steadies and steels my inner troubadour, Immersing myself in this mix of media is my way of conditioning to sing in face of Life’s Absurdity.

In these moments I remember Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” and I too assert that Sisyphus was indeed happy in the process of rolling the boulder up the hill no matter that it was destined to roll back down.

Enjoy the products of my art composting.

Susan Harrison

June 2025