Susan Marles

PERSONAL
Working career: Research Scientist (Natural Sciences)
Artistic work: Fibre, mixed media, paper

INSPIRATION
Susan Marles is a self-taught artist with a lifelong fascination for the visual arts. Her imaginative textile designs are influenced by her background in marine biology, paleontology, and the soil-plant relationships. Susan’s knowledge from living abroad inspires her architectural designs based on Near Eastern and Asian experiences.

PRODUCTION PROCESS
Susan gravitated to textiles from a natural fibres expertise in hand-spinning and weaving. Her fibre arts work in textiles reflects this earlier artwork by using surface embellishments to create 3-D texture.

Ideas for her landscapes and oceanic artwork are motivated by observation of different ecosystems using detailed photographs and field notes of these habitats — this imagery exemplifies our changing natural world, providing an engaging documentation of these alterations, with an eye to what we lose without good stewardship.