Susan Crowell

THE COLOR OF PAIN, THE TASTE OF SUFFERING, THE TREASURE OF ENDURANCE（in BCS and Koo Foundation Sun Yat-Sen Cancer Center）

Susan Crowell is Associate Professor of Art at the University of Michigan, where she teaches ceramics and directs the Residential College Art Gallery. Prof. Crowell studied at the Interlochen Arts Academy, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Michigan, where she earned her MFA.

A Fulbright Scholar, she studied architectural ceramics with Nino Caruso at Centro Internazionale di Ceramica in Rome. She has published numerous articles on architectural ceramics, ceramics in Italy, and contemporary ceramics and ceramic artists.

Crowell returns to Italy often to teach and conduct research. In 2003 she collaborated with Italian ceramic artists at two institutions in Sesto Fiorentino, Italy: Istituto Statale d’Arte and Gli Amici della Ceramica. More recently, Crowell has conducted research in northern Italy on “I Compianti sul Christo Morto”, the fifteenth-century lamentation groupings made of terra cotta, and the medieval towers of Rome.

Crowell exhibits her work widely and has participated in a variety of international venues and residencies, in Taiwan, Canada (at Banff), Japan (at Shigaraki and Miyazaki), and Italy (Rome, Florence and Venice) as well as in the United States.

Crowell’s work has addressed a number of themes, often employing text as part of its aesthetic. In the early nineties she used narrative ceramic vessels to interrogate the phenomenon of “flashing” and its role in claiming ownership of public space. In the mid-nineties, while in Japan, she researched the emergence of women into Japanese public life through the arts while making narrative vessel as staging devices for the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Since the end of that decade, Crowell’s mission has been to incorporate the moral (“The Seven Deadly Sins”) and the political and literary (“Howard Roark Can Kiss My Ass”) with the material (“Flaming Weenies and Weenie Waggers”) and the temporal (“Domestic Chronology”).

To this combination of elements, Crowell has added the ephemeral. Having engaged the notion of wind with the idea of wind in her “Via con il Vento” series from the late nineties, Crowell investigated the wind beyond its physical representation, developing forms and methods for capturing it. A participant in the “Sound + Vision” residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, she installed Flutestream, a project involving the creation of curved instruments made of vitrified ceramics, presented in concert with the sounds they generated. Like other projects Crowell has created, Flutestream deployed the wind as a discursive and thematic element.

Crowell’s current work interrogates the icons of modernity and sculptural form—the work of Arp and Mirò in particular—cast into the rigors of ceramic material and discipline. In the “Nociceptor” series, she has embarked upon an investigation of chronic pain and ways to represent it visually. Using rich textures, saturated colors and powerful biomorphic forms, she explores the physical and psychological dimensions of the most common of human experiences.

（Information from Biography）