Find Northern Michigan art on display at the Oliver Art Center in Frankfort, including work from Michigan textile artist Susan Moran October 16 through November 25. Learn more about her work below and find the original writeup in the September 2015 issue of Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine.
Michigan textile artist Susan Moran draws a lot of her creative inspiration from the natural world—but her techniques, and even the textiles themselves, also act as her muses. “I like to let the nature of the fabric express itself,” she says. “One reason I love working with fabric is that it’s so varied and it brings a lot to the design itself. There’s a lot of different ways you can create a pattern or image on cloth—ways of manipulating cloth that suggest texture or, say, pattern on water.”
The Ann Arbor resident and longtime College for Creative Studies instructor is often sparked by walks in the woods; back in the studio she’ll abstract an image, breaking it apart and reassembling it with other elements. A recent series, for example, was inspired by her fascination with the milkweed plant: “It’s a bit strange and ungainly, but at the same time, beautiful.”
From October 16 through November 25, Moran’s work will be featured alongside a large new installation of clay sculptures by Empire artist John Dietsch in a joint exhibition at Frankfort’s Oliver Art Center. On October 17, Moran will also be teaching a workshop in shibori, a Japanese fabric dying technique.
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