Opening Reception June 17

Carolyn Halliday uses the vocabulary and skills of textiles to sculpt forms that often reference body and/or nature. She hand knits wire and other nontraditional materials into forms that often grow from simple elements of nature and life’s daily debris. With her work, she magnifies nature and references concepts of the feminine through the female form and domesticity.

My Father’s Religion grew from her experience growing up with a father who loved the woods. Her father’s religion was in the woods. The family spent all of their free time in the Northern Woods. At the time Carolyn would have preferred to stay in a hotel. Nonetheless, her father passed his religion onto her.

My Father’s Religion is an installation that explores the calligraphic nature of a knit line, pays homage to the sanctuary of the woods, and questions if art, as in Byzantium, can transform life. This installation is laid out like a Byzantine church(cross shape)The reference to the Byzantine church comes from her fascination with the idea that the images created for the church, during the Byzantium, were allegedly so powerfully beautiful that they converted people to Christianity. Can art or the beauty of nature transform one today?

Textile Art by Susan Hensel

Discover the transformative textile art by Susan Hensel. Susan Hensel is a multie artist. With a 50+ year career. She combines a mixed media practice with embroidery across digital and manual platforms. She also makes sculptures and wall art using the colors and techniques of commercial embroidery.

These artworks are designed on the computer. Then stitched out on the computer-aided embroidery machine. The goal is to create an experience for the viewer that overwhelms with color and transcends the quotidian. Encouraging one, for even a few seconds, to step outside the narrative of the ego into a place of pure sensation.

Hensel’s artwork is known and collected nationwide. It is represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute. There are major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts. University of Washington, Baylor University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Archives pertaining to her artist’s books are available for study at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle. Hensel’s curatorial work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan with the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery. Hensel has curated over seventy exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists from all over the United States and Canada.

In recent years, Hensel has been awarded multiple grants and residencies through the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Ragdale Foundation.