I began my career as an abstract landscape painter after graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1974. What had always piqued my interest in developing my work was looking backward to the past and so my journey began with sojourns in Sicily, Florence and Spain and the engaging Dordogne region of France famous for cave paintings and markings.
Horizons were to expand again in 1988 when I left for West Africa to live for what would be nine years. In Mauritania the desert was a new field of exploration; undulating dunes and minimal landscape. In contrast, moving on to Liberia, West Africa, and its civil crisis in 1992 I was moved and saddened by a culture on the verge of collapse. In 1997 I moved to Nigeria, West Africa and by now textiles had entered my realm of thought and I began to incorporate the essence of cloth in my abstract work.
In 2000 I moved to Providence RI and looked to landscape once again using walnut ink and a bamboo stick to create tapestries of line, grids and abstract markings, never straying far from a culmination of experiences in countries that were vastly different form my roots in America.
“Something as small as an arrowhead, profound as ancient cave drawings, as worn as renaissance frescoes or perhaps the hennaed hand of a desert friend- this is the world that informs my art. In turn, I take this landscape of place and time and make abstract markings; spiky pod shapes, collapsed grids, woven paths that bend and meander and horizon lines that are woven into tapestries of texture. It is a process that has evolved over the years, a continuum of components from many experiences.”
Susan Hardy