Artist Statement

As a fiber and textile artist, I find inspiration in the rich history and traditions of quilting and other textile arts. My work is an homage to the generations of skilled, but often anonymous generations of makers who created a path for me to follow while becoming an artist after a short career in journalism and a much longer one in software development.

I start with found textiles that I repurpose, like an unfinished quilt top made in the 1960s from my family's worn out clothes, or clothing from thrift shops or resale stores. I often overdye or paint these found materials to suit my color schemes. I also use one of many surface design techniques to print, stamp, dye or paint plain textiles to make custom ones suitable for the work I have in mind. 

When my material is ready I bind together quilt tops, batting and backing fabric with my manual, long-arm quilting machine. I need very tight quilting to make my material sturdier than a functional bed quilt would typically be. So even though I use a machine to quilt, even a half yard of fabric can take more than an hour to quilt. With this stiff quilted fabric, I can build smaller forms with no internal armature. For larger forms, I use fabric-wrapped steel wire that I sew inside the form to help it hold its shape.

Once I have quilted yardage, I build models from paper, which behave much like quilted textiles. I shape and reshape these models until they have taken the form I need to express the ideas I'm pondering for each specific work. 

When the paper model is right, I take it apart and use it as pattern to build quilted sculptures that seem familiar and utilitarian, but are neither. Some of my forms reference clay vessels but the soft and porous materials I use rebel against the idea of functionality. Other forms represent real-life, everyday objects that serve as stand-ins for personal or societal issues that I am considering when I build each piece.

The results of these fiber experiments let me express my thoughts and feelings about society's expectations for women, our bodies and our labor. Some of my work deals with the offshoots of those expectations, as how from an early age, many young girls are encouraged to dream about and plan for the day they'll marry and live "happily ever after" with no mention of what comes after the wedding. I've explored what happens when women don't feel safe in their daily lives and how external pressure from religious expectations can harm a marriage instead of supporting it. My most personal work reveals the lasting damage that the trauma of sexual assault can leave on the human body and soul.

My artistic process, which is lengthy and repetitive, becomes a meditation on "women's work" — the painstaking labor, both mental and physical — that has historically been dismissed as merely decorative or utilitarian instead of as the product of a fertile and creative mind. By transforming quilts into non-functional sculptural works that invite viewers to think about concepts that may be controversial, I question the notion that crafts cannot be used to create fine art while also commenting on the invisibility of women's labor.

Bio

Susan Allred is a mixed media artist who works primarily with fiber to explore the ways it affects and reflects our daily lives.

In May 2022, How Does Your Armor Grow was awarded First Place at the 2022 Annual Juried Art Show. In May 2020, Allred’s mixed media piece Invitation to a Tea Party was awarded Best in Show at Mesa Community College’s 2020 Annual Juried Student Art Show. In July 2020, she received a grant from The Carmody Foundation’s Art For Good Arizona Project. In 2019, her fiber sculpture Bound was selected to appear at the Eric Fischl Vanguard Showcase, at the Phoenix Art Museum and in the Eric Fischl Gallery, where it was awarded Second Place in the 3D Media category.

Allred was an artist member at Eye Lounge contemporary art space from February 2020 — May 2023 and served as co-president from January 2022 — May 2023. During a three-month residency at the Ceramics Research Center at the ASU Art Musuem, Allred was given the time and space to scale up her work, and she created two large versions of her Walking Skirts series, which explore the costs women pay for exercising their freedoms.

She lives and works in Tempe, Arizona.