Artist Bio

Suzanne M Long born and raised in Willow Grove PA. She studied Illustration and Graphic Design at Tyler School of Art at Temple University. After graduating, she moved to New York and worked as a freelance Illustrator and Production Artist. She then traveled to the west in the summer of 1990 and fell in love with the Bay Area. She packed up and moved to San Francisco in early 1991, where she  continued her work as a freelance Illustrator and Production Artist. In 1992 she rented a studio space in an artist community in Benicia CA and started a transition from commercial work to fine art. It was then that she also started writing at this time and soon incorporate her written work into my visual work. After much effort and an equal amount of failure in meshing the two mediums, she started working three dimensionally. She’s been a sculptor since 1996.

Artist Statement

“My work is about memory, adding a visual narrative to my thoughts. My work is about melancholy and humor, politics and storytelling. Sometimes I don’t know what my work is about, I just have a compulsion to make it. I let my hands lead, other times my mind. I like to work in series, a season of work, making the same piece over and over, like picking out the notes on a piano, practicing. I repeat it again and again until it is a part of me, then I can release the concept, with some understanding of it. My work teaches me who I am, it defines the edges for a time, then my focus changes and my work becomes something else. It answers a question for me; it poses a question to me. ” – Suzanne Long

“Suzanne Long’s world of mixed media ceramics is mainly inhabited by fragments of childhood memories. Long revels in the use of personal icons, which originate in her youth. Text-titles, short stories and parables-is incorporated prominently in many of her pieces. Suzanne Long entices the viewer with the familiar, only to carve away at expectations and take him or her by surprise. The playfulness of her pieces seem to contradict the maturity of the often self-referential subject matter. The overall tension between humor and melancholy, childhood and adulthood, resonate with philosophical questions of existence.” – Carlos Rojas formerly of 1212 Gallery. Currently Partner of Monte Azule, Costa Rica.