About Susan Prince Thompson

“Her work is so inventive, so exceptionally wrought, so openly seductive that you want it to endure. But durability wasn’t a factor for Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, or Tom Hall, so why should I let it bother me?”

--from “Wit And Works Of Art” –review of two person show, Roger Prince and Susan Prince Thompson, at June Fitzpatrick Gallery, Portland, Maine—by Philip Isaacson in the Maine Sunday Telegram, June 17, 2007

Susan Prince Thompson grew up in New England in a family of sculptors, painters, and craftsmen where the making of things was an integral part of daily life. As a teenager, she learned to weave, spin, make pots, and lots of other skills at High Mowing School in New Hampshire, where for the past ten years she has been back to teach fulltime in both the studio and the classroom.

After a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she deepened her love of literature, broadened her horizons in every way, and got political. It was the early 1970’s. She moved on to try her hand at a little labor organizing in Colorado for a year.

Continuing west, she ended up in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area and stayed for about eighteen years, working a variety of jobs, having many adventures, and ranging about, studying at California College of the Arts, the DeYoung Museum School, Pacific Basin School of Textile Arts, California Institute of Integral Studies, and San Francisco State University, where she eventually received a B.A. in Liberal Studies and an M.F.A. focused on sculpture and textiles.

Early on, she met her husband George Thompson, the Sanskritist and Vedic scholar and recent translator of the Bhagavad Gita, who got her interested in ancient languages and the study of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Their two sons, Akira and Nikolai, were born in San Francisco and Oakland. Susan taught art to children and adults in a variety of settings in both cities and spent time working in an indigenous arts gallery while completing her graduate studies. In 1991 they all moved back east to northern New England.

Susan’s work has of course been informed by all of these experiences and interests.
She utilizes an eclectic range of techniques in fabricating her pieces, which are usually created with scavenged materials— like old books, maps, scraps of paper and paper bags, wire, stones, and linen rags. She enjoys making new raw materials by transforming old objects and substances whose original meaning and value have faded. Her work is labor intensive and the element of time—and lots of it—is evident. Drawing is a big part of her work as well, though it’s drawing that tends to hover on the cusp of three dimensions, incorporating cut paper, thread, reflective substances, and shadows.

Ideas about language, books, and writing are still central to her work and life, as are dreams, imaginings, and memories of other worlds where every manmade thing is made by hand.

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CONTACT -- soozprince@gmail.com cell# 603-801-5887