Finding Form

Sue Havens is an artist based in New York and Tampa and is currently Associate Professor of Art at The University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. Her solo exhibition at FGCU will combine two- and three-dimensional works to create an immersive installation in the gallery.

Disparate influences — such as the lights on amusement park rides at the state fair, dotted sidewalk pavers, painted lines in parking lots, thrift store fabrics, cracked pavement, Turkish kilims and ruins, supermarket packaging, miniature golf architecture, and tree bark — are bolstered by ongoing investigations of flatness, dimensionality, color, and pattern within painting and sculpture. Havens creates new forms by culling references from areas lived in, places travelled, and by objects and ephemera collected - so that content might be remembered, discovered, and felt.

The hybrid nature of her expanding practice evolves in cycles, as she exhausts possibilities for pushing boundaries within media. Havens challenges and redefines notions of boundaries within painting and sculpture, driven by contradiction and the challenge of engaging with complex ideas. See more of her work at suehavensstudio.com

Sponsored by The Layden Family Foundation, The Smith Family Foundation of Estero, Method & Concept, The Southwest Florida Fine Craft Guild, and WGCU Public Media.

Image credit: Sue Havens, Butterfly (detail), 2017, Raku fired clay and ceramic glaze