Susan Giles

Gestural Traces and Material Memory, 2023, 9/27 Edition

Handmade Artist Book, 20 pages

10 x 15 inches

Courtesy of the artist

Susan Giles's interdisciplinary practice explores the intersections of memory, communication, and physical presence. Individual and collective narratives of movement, monuments, architecture and landscape have informed her studio work. Recent interpretations of recalled experiences and corresponding hand gestures seek to define where language becomes sculptural. Giles' work has shown in Chicago at the Chicago Cultural Center, The Hyde Park Art Center, THE MISSION, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Renaissance Society, as well as Mixed Greens in New York, Galeria Valle Orti in Valencia, Spain, and Five Years, London, UK. Major commissions include a permanent sculpture for the University of Chicago in 2021 and a public art commission by Jason Rosenthal in memory of Amy Krouse Rosenthal for the Chicago Park District in 2019. In 2021 she was a finalist for a Creative Capital Award. She has received numerous grants, including an Individual Artist Project Grant from DCASE in 2022, 2019, 2017 and 2015, awards from the Illinois Arts Council in 2014 and 2009, a 2005 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a 1998 Fulbright Grant to Indonesia. Giles is an Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a 2023 Visiting Teaching Fellow in Built Environment, Arts, Design & Architecture at University of New South Wales in Sydney.