Susan Joseph is a contemporary artist whose practice unfolds across multiple disciplines, guided by curiosity rather than constraint. Working fluidly between painting, video animation, performance-based montage, and experimental sound, Joseph occupies a media-rich creative terrain where questioning is continuous and outcomes remain intentionally open-ended. Her work resists linear narratives, instead embracing fragmentation, internal dialogue, and organic evolution as core artistic strategies.
Over the course of her career, Joseph has developed a practice that balances immediacy with reflection. While some of her works are driven by rapid experimentation and disruption, others unfold slowly, allowing form, gesture, and meaning to emerge over time. This duality between the impulsive and the contemplative defines her approach and lends her work a sense of quiet intensity.
Education and Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Vision
Susan Joseph received her Master of Fine Arts in 1986 from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, following her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, completed in 1984. Her formal training provided a strong foundation in visual inquiry while allowing room for interdisciplinary exploration. From early on, Joseph gravitated toward practices that crossed traditional boundaries, seeking forms that could accommodate complexity, ambiguity, and nonverbal thought.
This educational grounding continues to inform her work today, particularly in the rigor of her visual language and the conceptual coherence that underpins even her most experimental pieces. Whether working with paint, sound, or moving image, Joseph’s work reflects a deep engagement with process as a site of discovery rather than a means to predetermined conclusions.
Painting as a Space for Slow Resolution
While Susan Joseph’s practice spans multiple media, painting and drawing have become the primary spaces for the slow resolution of inquiry. Her paintings are not illustrations of ideas but visual fields where organic, abstract, and nonverbal questions are allowed to unfold. Gesture, layering, and rhythm play central roles, creating compositions that feel both intuitive and deliberate.
In these works, Joseph explores the tension between control and release. Forms emerge, dissolve, and reassert themselves, suggesting systems in flux rather than fixed conclusions. The paintings invite viewers into a contemplative state, asking them to engage with sensation, movement, and spatial relationships rather than narrative clarity. Meaning remains fluid, shaped as much by the viewer’s perception as by the artist’s intent.
Performance, Video, and the Disrupted Narrative
Parallel to her painting practice, Susan Joseph creates performance-based video and sound montages that extend her interest in internal dialogue and self-disruption. These works often play with fragmentation, layering image and sound to construct narratives that resist coherence. Rather than offering resolution, they mirror the experience of thought itself, interrupted, recursive, and nonlinear.
Her video works function as performative spaces where the artist’s internal conversations become externalized. Sound, image, and movement intersect in ways that feel both intimate and destabilizing. This self-disrupting narrative strategy challenges traditional storytelling and foregrounds process over outcome, inviting viewers to experience uncertainty as a generative state rather than a problem to be solved.
Experimental Sound and Diagrammatic Language
Joseph’s electronic sound work represents another vital dimension of her interdisciplinary practice. Driven by a patchwork of indecipherable yet visually compelling diagrams, these compositions occupy a space between structure and intuition. The diagrams serve less as instructions and more as poetic frameworks, guiding the creation of sound while leaving room for chance and interpretation.
These sonic works echo the qualities present in her visual art, including layering, rhythm, and abstraction, translating them into auditory form. Together, her sound, video, and visual practices form a cohesive ecosystem, each medium informing and enriching the others while maintaining its own material specificity.
The Transgressive Series: Nature as Metaphor and Force
The painting series titled Transgressive includes works such as Deep Purple and emerges from a deeply personal and environmental experience. After living in a studio environment in downtown Los Angeles for thirty years, Joseph relocated to Albuquerque, where she found herself in a house with a yard for the first time in decades. Determined to cultivate a garden, she began watering the soil in preparation for planting.
What followed was an unexpected eruption of morning glory sprouts, emerging in the hundreds and spreading rapidly across the garden space. The delicate blossoms and reaching, spiraling vines quickly overtook the carefully planned layout, asserting their presence with undeniable vitality. This profusion resonated deeply with Joseph’s artistic sensibilities, reflecting the kind of abundance, movement, and organic complexity she seeks to capture in her work.
Deep Purple and the Strength of Life Force
Moved by the morning glories’ intricate dance, Joseph began photographing and painting them, translating their energy into abstracted visual forms in works such as Deep Purple. In this painting, the plant life becomes more than a botanical subject. It functions as a metaphor for life force itself, its strength, persistence, and ethereal complexity.
In Deep Purple, this vitality is expressed through layered movement and chromatic intensity that mirrors the unstoppable growth of the vines. The composition suggests both delicacy and power, echoing the way the blossoms appear fragile while possessing the ability to dominate space. Color, gesture, and rhythm work together to convey a sense of continuous expansion and interconnection.
The title Transgressive speaks not only to the plants’ physical takeover of the garden but also to a broader philosophical stance. It reflects an embrace of disruption, overflow, and resistance to imposed boundaries. Growth in this context is neither orderly nor polite. It is expansive, assertive, and unapologetically alive.
Nature as Collaborator and Catalyst
In the Transgressive series, nature functions not simply as inspiration but as collaborator. The morning glories dictate movement, rhythm, and compositional flow, offering Joseph a visual language rooted in observation and response. The paintings do not document the garden but translate its energy into abstract form, allowing sensation and metaphor to guide the process.
This approach aligns seamlessly with Joseph’s broader practice, which consistently privileges emergence over control. Whether working with paint, sound, or moving image, she allows systems to unfold organically, trusting intuition while remaining attentive to structure.
A Practice of Openness and Inquiry
Susan Joseph’s work is united by a commitment to openness, openness to materials, to process, and to uncertainty. Across painting, video, and sound, she creates spaces where questioning is sustained rather than resolved. Her art does not seek to explain but to evoke, encouraging viewers to linger within complexity and ambiguity.
Through works like Deep Purple and her ongoing exploration of the Transgressive series, Joseph continues to investigate the delicate balance between structure and freedom, intention and accident. Her practice stands as a meditation on growth, vitality, and the unseen forces that shape creative expression, offering a nuanced and deeply felt engagement with the living world.
