You may recognize Suze as the People’s Choice Award Winner from our past exhibition, Threshold.
Suze Woolf is a life-long outdoor person. Her art work is primarily about nature, and she creates much of it in the field. She has watched glaciers shrink and burned-over forests increase all over the North American West. At first, as a landscape painter, she began painting whole intact scenes, but soon was compelled to portray their ecological disturbances. Then, close-up studies of individual trees became a metaphor for human impact: our human predilection for cooking the planet.
Yet for all her fear and grief, she also sees unusual beauty. Wildfire fighters call fire-carved standing snags “totems:” all the same – carbonized, eaten away; yet each different – the fire’s physics and the tree’s biological structure create unique sculptures. Each ridge and fissure becomes a landscape unto itself. Char remains iridescent for up to a decade, reflecting local light and color.
She has worked to confront anxiety about climate crisis in a variety of media, from painting, paper casting, and pyrographic drawings to artist books. Like most of her best work, the results are both beautiful and disturbing.
This work is expected to remain on display through November.
Library Address: 308 Kirkland Avenue, Kirkland, WA 98033
Details:
Meet Suze Woolf and hear her talk about her exhibit at the Kirkland Library. She will be joined in conversation with Dr. David L. Peterson, Affiliate Professor, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington and Lorena Williams, former wildland firefighter and author.This event will take place on Tuesday, October 19 at 6:30 PM.
