Artist Statement
With fiber as my medium, I find a language both intimate and resilient—thread and fabric become vessels for the thoughts and emotions at the heart of women’s experiences. Much of my work has been based on quilting, but I also incorporate hand-painted or dyed textiles, coiling, wrapping, embroidery and wrapped-wire armatures in my sculptures.
My work examines the expectations placed on women, inviting reflection through honesty, humor, and quiet defiance. I've explored what happens when women don't feel safe in their daily lives and how external pressure from religious expectations can harm a marriage instead of supporting it. My most personal work reveals the lasting damage that the trauma of sexual assault can leave on the human body and soul.
My artistic process, which is lengthy and repetitive, becomes a meditation on "women's work" — the painstaking labor, both mental and physical — that has historically been dismissed as merely decorative or utilitarian instead of as the product of a fertile and creative mind. By transforming quilts into non-functional sculptural works that invite viewers to think about concepts that may be controversial, I question the notion that crafts cannot be used to create fine art while also commenting on the invisibility of women's labor.
In 2025, I’m shifting my focus from personal stories to an issue every woman I’ve spoken with recognizes: unacknowledged and unreciprocated emotional labor.
Bio
Susan Allred is a mixed media artist who works primarily with fiber to explore the ways it affects and reflects our daily lives.
In May 2022, How Does Your Armor Grow was awarded First Place at the 2022 Annual Juried Art Show. In May 2020, Allred’s mixed media piece Invitation to a Tea Party was awarded Best in Show at Mesa Community College’s 2020 Annual Juried Student Art Show. In July 2020, she received a grant from The Carmody Foundation’s Art For Good Arizona Project. In 2019, her fiber sculpture Bound was selected to appear at the Eric Fischl Vanguard Showcase, at the Phoenix Art Museum and in the Eric Fischl Gallery, where it was awarded Second Place in the 3D Media category.
Allred was an artist member at Eye Lounge contemporary art space from February 2020 — May 2023 and served as co-president from January 2022 — May 2023. During a three-month residency at the Ceramics Research Center at the ASU Art Musuem, Allred was given the time and space to scale up her work, and she created two large versions of her Walking Skirts series, which explore the costs women pay for exercising their freedoms.
She lives and works in Tempe, Arizona.