NEOTECTONIC PERIOD
Susan Hensel, Multimedia Artist
RECEPTION May 9, 5 – 7pm with TALK at 6pm
EXHIBIT May 9 – July 26, 2025
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
I am a quiet contemplative, a delayed emotional reactor, a visual glutton. I think and mediate, I get angry the next day and I just simply have to look…all the time. From this essential disposition and with study and thought I have adopted a theory for my artmaking that I call “radical beauty.”
Irish poet and Priest John O’Donahue- “Even amidst chaos and disorder, something in the human mind continues to seek beauty. “
St. Augustine- “I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals, the things that creep. I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun the moon, the stars and to all things that stand at the doors of my flesh…My question was the gaze I turned to them. Their answer was their beauty.”
“Radical beauty” is not about pretty décor nor reproducing lush landscapes or beautiful faces any more than civility is about being nice. It is deeper and more political than that. “Radical beauty” is about creating glimpses of the world we want to see by providing “moments” of awe, meditation, surprise that might invite the viewer into action for healing of the planet, relationships, cultures, environments.
I contend that we all know that the world is truly broken. I do not need to see reproductions of devastation by even the most talented of artists to be reminded of these facts. I don’t want too many reminders. The facts are all around us. The weather is wild, wars rage, politics are more divisive than ever. Anger, threats, and suspicion reign and the capacity for hate rises.
I am aware of this. You are aware of this.
I contend that we need to be reminded of what we seek: peace, health, abundance.
-Susan Hensel
NEOTECTONIC PERIOD
A call for radical beauty
Neotectonics is the study of the motions and deformations of the Earth’s crust in current times, often in service of predicting earthquakes. It seemed to me that this can describe the seismic forces of climate change, cultural upheaval, pandemic, and political turmoil.
This body of work deals metaphorically with the effects and affects of climate change, globally and universally. It seeks to provide moments of contemplation and pause for the viewer to consider how they feel and to rest in the possibility of a world that is healed.
ARTIST BIO
Susan Hensel received her BFA from University of Michigan in 1972 with a double major in painting and sculpture and a concentration in ceramics. She has a history, to date, of more than 300 exhibitions, 35 of them solo, twenty + garnering awards. Recently, Susan had solo and 2-person and group exhibitions in Suwon Museum of Art, S. Korea; Artistry, Bloomington, MN and the Garrett Museum of Art, Garrett, IN as well as solo exhibitions in Leipzig, Germany, Hopkins, MN, Duluth, MN and Springfield, Il.
Hensel’s artwork is known and collected nationwide, represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute with major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts , University of Washington, Baylor University and University of Colorado at Boulder. Archives pertaining to her artists books are available for study at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle.
In recent years Hensel has been awarded multiple grants and residencies through the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Art to Change the World, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Ragdale Foundation.
Hensel’s curatorial work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan with the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery in Minneapolis. The Susan Hensel Gallery continues on Artsy.net as an online project promoting Midwest artists with a particular interest in materiality. Hensel has curated over one hundred exhibitions, and supporting events, of emerging and mid-career artists from all over the United States and Canada.