Department of Art
The Cascade Effect examines the changes taking place in Alaska. It communicates my personal perceptions of Alaska’s landscapes, its wildlife, and the interconnection of the complex symbiotic relationships that are the Alaska environment. Small, beautiful, visual indicators of change in plants, trees, and insects often go unnoticed, but nevertheless alter the environment. These changes manifest as impacts to wildlife, their habitats, food sources, migration patterns, and behaviors. My art practice brings awareness to the consequences that are rapidly changing Alaska’s environment.
Through painting, printmaking, and installation, I explore the shapes and forms of Alaska’s waterways, plants, and animals. I visually merge them together to express the contemporary environmental impacts we face and highlight the destructive beauty of a changing climate while communicating its threat to the environment and the wildlife that depend on it.
Cleared, Cut, and Woven. Lithograph, Sekishu paper, and artificial sinew.
Scale of The Fall. Woodcut, kitakata paper, sekishu paper, Japanese starch, watercolor, and artificial sinew.
Beauty of Decay, a Catalyst for Change. Lithograph on sekishu paper, artificial sinew, willow branch.
detail of Cleared, Cut, and Woven. Lithograph, Sekishu paper, and artificial sinew.
Born in Bryan, Texas and raised in the south, artist Susan Andrews worked as an airbrush artist and a graphic designer most of her life. In 2015, she decided to pursue a formal education in art. Susan received an Associate of Art at Pikes Peak Community College and a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting at Adams State University. She was accepted to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the fall of 2020, where she is currently a Master of Fine Art candidate. In May 2024, Susan will receive her MFA in painting and printmaking.
Susan’s passions lie with the natural world. Her current work, The Cascade Effect, investigates the complex relationships between the environment and wildlife. Through abstract representation, she highlights the integral connections between salmon and the environment through motifs of strength, safety, and representations of imminent loss. This love of nature originated in her childhood and was nurtured by her father and the forests of her childhood.
