Susan’s Art
Susan Rose April is a Maryland-based artist whose work is featured on a number of literary magazine covers. She earned her MFA from Vermont College and works in the area of photographic collage and visual poetry.
Her influences include the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard who, along with the Belgian surrealist, René Magritte, informed her MFA thesis—Wound Caused by an Expanding Bullet: An Inquiry into the Nexus Between Photography and Poetry.
Using vintage photographs and postcards as source material, April explores the interplay of textural sense within the breccia of antique bottles, shards of glass, rocks, and fractured material. She calls the collection “Fault Zones.”
Work in progress.
“I lean on my geology training. It serves me well. A fault is a weak zone within a tectonic plate where the pressure builds, then breaks through causing earthquakes. The damage zone extends beyond the fault. Human attitudes and actions are another sort of tectonic plate and can inflict generations of pain. The damage zone, when things rupture, is immense. In my images, I try to bind the wound. Shards of glass act as shield or shelter. Medicine bottles are salve.”
