Susana Arce – Bio
Textiles seem like something eternal, capable of capturing time and conveying what has been lived.
Wool, silk, thread and working with fabrics have always helped Susana Arce to define her identity. The attraction for the materials that have ended up compiling her alphabet goes back to her childhood, to the afternoons learning with her grandmother.
In her works, poetry, light and fabric come together to talk to us about the passage of time, about life as a journey in search of the truth and one's own self beyond fears and obstacles, about the beauty of the marks and transformations that this journey will inevitably provoke in us, and about our need of others in this path of knowledge.
In 2005 she moved to England, where she learned about the nuno felting technique, and she studied at the West Dean College of Arts and Conservation. This technique allows her to create textures and volumes by combining different fabrics with wool. Since 2016, after a research trip to Japan, during which she learned about the work of Itchiku Kubota, Susana Arce devoted herself entirely to the artistic creation through textiles.
She has exhibited in Peninsulares, 4th Iberian Meetings of Contemporary Textile Art (Museu de Lanificios Covilha, Portugal, and El Brocense, Diputación de Cáceres) (2023), National Silk Museum of Hangzhou (2020), Museo del Traje de Madrid (2017), at the Diputación de Albacete (2021), at Espai La Galeria (Terrassa), and she participated in the exhibition project 2+dos=5 with the collective exhibition Brought (by the wind) at Sala Muncunill in Terrassa (2019).
Artist's Statement
Although I studied Biology due to family circumstances, I have felt an enormous attraction to textiles from a very young age, since I learned to knit with my grandmother, and I believe that working with fabric, wool, and thread has always helped me preserve my own identity. Textiles appear to me as something eternal, that captures time and conveys what has been lived. Felt has something organic and vital, where the sense of touch is very important.
When I knead the wool to introduce it into the silk, there is a moment my hands feel when it has become a fabric, and for me that is something almost magical, which allows me to enter into communion with what I do. As Chillida said: ‘touch is more than a sense, it is the interaction of all the senses’.
The passage of time, memory, oblivion and the void left by absence, self-improvement, and our need of others in our life path, are the themes that mostly inspire my work.