Next up in our Hybrid Practices studio visit series is Sue Hettmansperger, retired painting professor from the University of Iowa.
Sue’s sun-drenched studio in Iowa City is a repository of supplies and ephemera necessary to create her abstract paintings and small-scale collage works.
For Sue, collage is a form of creative expression that speaks most about our current moment as a society. In our daily lives and culture, we are bombarded by jarring images in the media. The collages include photographs of dry, cracked earth, fragments of bent steel, and shapes of color that are made into new, intertwining patterns.
Beauty lies in the fissures. The cross-pollination of media is like a prescribed burn where growth emerges afterward. Construction after a rupture.
Simultaneous viewing of Sue’s collages and paintings is a satisfying yet challenging visual exercise. Activity abounds and the eye travels as the immediacy and hard edges of the collages give way to the mediative forms in the paintings and vice versa. Certainly one can sense the rich and varied life of the artist through the works’ twists and turns.