Susan Aurand
Susan received her MA from Ohio State University and joined the faculty at The Evergreen State College. She taught ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture and art history there until retiring as Faculty Emerita in 2018. Her artworks are in numerous collections, including the Washington State Arts Commission Public Art Collection, the Seattle Portable Works Collection, The City of Olympia Portable Works Collection, The Bainbridge Island Art Museum Cynthia Spears Collection, and The University of Washington Book Arts Collection.
Artist Statements
Skylight
These works are from an ongoing series of paintings titled "Sky Doors" that began simply with my constant amazement at the ever-changing color and forms in the skies here in this Northwest land of clouds. It was also influenced by my long-standing interest in mythology, where the sky is universally understood as a portal to a different land. I started thinking of it as a portal to all times and places at the same time, or as an invitation to see through time and space.
Thickets and Tangles
As a kid, I loved to find secret places under shrubs and in thickets. Tangles of branches seem to collect energy and are sheltering; they are good places for making nests, which are hopeful things. I loved also to find and tie together small objects, as if to make talismans or dream nets, long before I learned what these were. The drawings also refer to the old game of Cat's Cradle, a game of making images appear and disappear by manipulating loops of string on one's fingers – a game that always seemed magical to me.
Ways of Rising Up
This series began several years ago, as photographs I took of amazing cloud formations on an extraordinary day high up in the Italian Dolomites. As I thought about what to do with them, they gradually became meditation pieces on the constant movement /transformation between earth and sky. Birds explode from hidden places into the vast openness overhead, the moisture of clouds cycles up and down, trees reach down into the earth and up into the heavens, and all things transform - light into matter and back into light.
Artist Statements
Skylight
These works are from an ongoing series of paintings titled "Sky Doors" that began simply with my constant amazement at the ever-changing color and forms in the skies here in this Northwest land of clouds. It was also influenced by my long-standing interest in mythology, where the sky is universally understood as a portal to a different land. I started thinking of it as a portal to all times and places at the same time, or as an invitation to see through time and space.
Thickets and Tangles
As a kid, I loved to find secret places under shrubs and in thickets. Tangles of branches seem to collect energy and are sheltering; they are good places for making nests, which are hopeful things. I loved also to find and tie together small objects, as if to make talismans or dream nets, long before I learned what these were. The drawings also refer to the old game of Cat's Cradle, a game of making images appear and disappear by manipulating loops of string on one's fingers – a game that always seemed magical to me.
Ways of Rising Up
This series began several years ago, as photographs I took of amazing cloud formations on an extraordinary day high up in the Italian Dolomites. As I thought about what to do with them, they gradually became meditation pieces on the constant movement /transformation between earth and sky. Birds explode from hidden places into the vast openness overhead, the moisture of clouds cycles up and down, trees reach down into the earth and up into the heavens, and all things transform - light into matter and back into light.
