Susan Matthews

Susie Matthews is a multi-media artist, currently working primarily with ceramic and textile mediums.  She first moved to Rhode Island in order to to attend college and received a BA in studio art from Brown University in 1995. She also studied wooden boatbuilding in the northwest and earned her one hundred-ton captain’s license soon after graduation.  After working in the nautical world, she returned to graduate school and received her master’s degree in the art of teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998.  As she was teaching high school art in Bristol, she rediscovered her passion for ceramics and moved on to study at UMASS Dartmouth and RISD.  She received her MFA in ceramics from RISD in 2004. While focusing her energies on being a domestic goddess for the last decade, she also served for three years on the board of the Jamestown Arts Center and chaired the exhibition committee there. Her work has been shown in various venues, primarily in the Rhode Island area, including AS220’s reading room, the Newport Art Museum, the Jamestown Arts Center, the Warwick Museum of Art, and the South County Art Association. Susie lives with her family in Jamestown RI, and works in her studio at the Shady Lea Mill in North Kingston.

Artist Statement

My primary artistic objectives are to better understand and illustrate how contradictions and variability can be integral to, and inherent in, a single entity as well as to create an experience of interaction; intimacy or denial of intimacy.  With this experience I intend to question the ‘viewer’s’ comfort level and find the space between fear and silliness, playfulness and power-struggle.  I use materials that are traditionally thought of as ‘craft’ mediums for the associations and familiarity they bring to the work as well as their intrinsic hard and soft, strong and fragile qualities.