Combining painting and sculpture into innovative forms
Each sculpture is made by combining individual paintings created by Susan Maddux in her studio in Los Angeles.
Paintings are carefully, intentionally folded and shaped to create dimensional sculptures.
Painting, folding, combining: The process happens over and over. Progress is fluid, changes and discoveries are made as the piece evolves organically.
Los Angeles-based artist Susan Maddux was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to a hapa Japanese-American family.
Her fiber art work is strongly influenced by Japanese folk art, Buddhist temples, tropical flora, and the arts of Polynesia.
After attending the San Francisco Art Institute for painting, Susan relocated to New York City. She began working in textile design, and her love of personal expression through beautiful garments lead to a passion for pattern and color that continues to influence her work to this day.
In 2012 she relocated from New York to Los Angeles, her studio practice focused searching for a way to connect more spiritually and emotionally with her painting.
her design experience led her to consider her paintings as transformational material.
A creative floodgate was opened by this approach, and she began to cut up, tear, collage, and sew unstretched paintings, freely experimenting with different ways of reconfiguring them.
This work explores expectations about abstraction, materials, and the relationship between painting and sculpture, resulting in the creation of large sculptural pieces with a powerful anthropomorphic quality.
Susan has a Bachelors of Fine Arts in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and has had group and solo shows across the United States for three decades.
Her work has been seen in Luxe Magazine, Design Milk, LA Design Festival, Anthropologie, the Ace Hotel, the Conrad Hotel, and many others.
She currently works out of her studio in Downtown Los Angeles where she continues to explore the transformative area between painting and sculpture, incorporating natural materials, investigating her Japanese heritage, and making large fiber art pieces that have a powerful totemic quality.
