SUSANNAH HAYS

EGYPT 1993 28 pp., twenty gelatin-silver prints, 14½x11¾"
Shortly after my grandmother’s death in 1992, I made a six-week journey to Egypt, in search of the beginning of time. I looked for old Egypt— those images, which could have been seen hundred's of years ago. The 20 images selected were printed on agfa's portriga paper and mounted to b.f.k. paper inside a gently de-bossed frame. The folios were gathered and coptically bound, between papyrus-covered boards with letterpress title page, artist statement, a list of images, and colophon. Edition:  15.

ONE SUN vandyke brown silver-sun print photograms. The position of the earth (an apple) is rendered by way of the sun’s rays and shadow formations. Over the course of one day, nine light drawings are scroll mounted, charting the earth’s natural moving relationship to the sun.  Various seasons of the year reveal gradual apogee and perigee of time/space.  This unique penumbra series began in 1998.

BETWEEN CEDAR & VINE 2008 accordion book, hand bound illustrated throughout, 12¼x8½" emerged from inside the larger global path of a personal sacred journey— a tale that thrives between earth and cosmos. From these two perspectives, a world within worlds collapsed into each other after 25-years of practiced "chance operation”. This invented daily treasure-hunt between the circumscribed space two streets embrace the magical wonders of the cosmos and the artist’s neighborhood while intuitively sensing the subconscious memories of childhood. Each sign a code, a symbolic thread represents a fragment in the search for home. In retrospect, spaces of place are de-scribed as individual poetic moments that formed a visual narrative—an autobiography of the self as represented by the enigmatic sounds of invisible neighborhood voices. In 2002 the collected documents, without foresight, inadvertently became a book. The limited edition was finally published in 2008 as a scanned digital production created from the 'found objects' and photographs. 

RHIZOMES 2009 is an anti – book project investigating Gilles Deluze & Félix Guattari’s daring text: A THOUSAND PLATEAUS. In 1980, the authors intuited: “We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.” To deterritorialize this well-known essay is to have undone and reterritorialized the worn impression of its being just another philosophical text to reflect on.  By freeing the text from its original production, I recuperate the vitality of immanence, bringing justice to the authors’ spirit. I found strata to be immediately excavateable.  One sentence at a time, I disassembled it. The new assemblage is more tightly regimented; hence the essay reads as an explicit modularity, articulating the geological movements and territories without attributing any single subject, leaving “multiple roots” or a multiplicity of plateaus. The images are printed digitally with epson inks on moab colorado fiber satin paper. The text is xeroxed on archival paper. 100 card set measures: 4 x 5 inches.

NEW MEXICO LANDSCAPES  (2015-16)  is a suite of five  hand-sewn photo books archivally printed on Japanese paper. Two pilgrimage sites—Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon—are joined with 3 walks through the Galisteo Basin unifying ancient sacred rituals with the everyday as testament toward remembering the perpetuity of the cosmos as one whole. Digitally printed on Niyodo Kozo paper and hand stitched with Japanese pouch-sewing, the pages are “butter-flied” allowing images to fall naturally to their edges. This seamless approach creates an uninterrupted space-time immersion for the viewer to sense the scale of the architectural structures, with their surrounding colors and textures.  The collection is housed in a sandstone red clamshell box with silver-foil stamping. Limited to an edition of 10, please inquire regarding purchase of full suite, individual books or prints.

Bisti Badlands: De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area  New Mexico (2023)  Unlike many areas of the Southwest, where hunter-gathers and more advanced civilizations lived, the De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area is not inhabitable.  Laid down some 75.5 million years ago by a warm, humid, shallow sea, this seasonal coastal swamp, with poor drainage and frequent flooding, eventually receded revealing sedimentary geological layers of sandstone, shale, ash and black coal.  Majestic in scale, this entropic seaway where plants and animals sank into the sand, inspired an unknown sense of unity that Georgia O’Keeffe called The Black Place. While the Bitumen of Judea, silver halides and halogens of my medium suggest a kinship with chiaroscuro graphite drawing, I immersed myself further into the black hills of this once below sea level complex mixture of minerals and salts, to find my aesthetic attraction becoming fused with nature’s reality. The crackled texture of these day-lighted Cretaceous contours, rendered rock-solid by the sun, were created by the same ferric to ferrous reduction as my iron salt heliograms. As above, so below, the soulful action of solar light touches Permian depths.

Printed on Kozo paper and hand stitched with Japanese pouch-sewing, the pages printed flush with archival pigment inks are “butter-flied” allowing the images to fall naturally to their edges. This seamless approach creates an uninterrupted space-time immersion for the viewer to sense the scale of this barren territory. Housed in a heavy-weight black textured mulberry paper sleeve, the edition is limited to 5 copies and measures: 17x13 inches. Please inquire separately regarding aquistion of individual prints.