Susy Bielak

Lives and works in Chicago, IL, USA

Artist statement

Some projects begin with a weather report. Others with a kitchen table, a box of family slides, a vessel of volcanic ash, or a walk along the lake. I return to the things I can’t leave behind. My work begins with these encounters rather than a particular medium. They become questions I return to over months and often years. Research and making unfold together through fieldwork, archival digs, experimentation, and collaboration across disciplines. The form follows. Each project finds its own language: a painting, an installation, a sculpture, a photograph, a visual poem. In recent work, I have been moving between Lake Michigan and the volcanic terrain surrounding Popocatépetl and Paso de Cortés. Camas de Ceniza / Ash Beds brings together paintings on amate paper, broom forms made from gathered plants, volcanic ash, photographs, visual poems, and drawings made directly on gallery windows. The project traces relationships among body and weather, breath and ash, erosion and maintenance, memory and place. Drawing, mapping, sweeping, and gathering plant material become ways of making temporary order within shifting conditions. Vientos combines drawings made with my breath, visual poetry translating scientific language, and collaborations with choreographers, using wind as both material and metaphor. Segundo Piso / Second Story integrates domestic furniture into hybrid sculptures and outsized watercolor paintings, using remembered interiors as points of departure for a project...

Artwork