Susan Warner Keene

In Water Line I am using the fluid medium of papermaking to observe the power of water to form and imprint our world. On its way to becoming an object, paper consists of a water-infused membrane sensitive to flow, stress, passages of light – much like our own bodies, like the Earth’s crust. Intervening in this state, I find there are many ways to contemplate permanence and change. For several years my work has concentrated on the membrane of the “page” as an expressive form in its own right, not simply as a support. As a medium, papermaking attracts me because the material and the process it undergoes seem to embody a kind of lived experience not unlike our own. At the same time, paper is culturally linked to ideas, language, and communication, crucial features of our humanity.

The Globe and Mail, February 6, 2010,
VISUAL ARTS>>REVIEW Page R14

GARY MICHAEL DAULT, GALLERY GOING
SUSAN WARNER KEENE AT THE DAVID KAYE GALLERY
$600-$2,800. Until Feb. 28; 1092 Queen St. W., Toronto,
www.davidkayeprojects.com, 416-532-9075

Susan Warner Keene is a virtuoso papermaker. For her exhibition, Water Line, she states that she is “using the fluid medium of papermaking to observe the power of water to form and imprint our world.” To that end, Keene skillfully shapes her membrane-like sheets of handmade paper into myriad of suggestive relief configurations which look like nets, altar pieces, views of night sky and crumpled letters and stories…

TORONTO STAR, February 6, 2010
ENTERTAINMENT Page E2

Peter Goddard

TODAY’S THE DAY Last-minute ideas for a Saturday in the city
AFTERNOON Paper swoon

Opening today, Susan Warner Keene’s “Water Line” exhibition manages to be introspective and audacious at the same time. The artist and papermaker sees each of her meticulously handcrafted pages- many brilliantly colourful- as an “expressive form in its own right, not simply as a support” for words or imagery. Keene’s practice also leads to to the radical understanding that paper is in fact “a water-infused membrane, sensitive to flow, stress (and) passages of light,” she says, “much like our own bodies, or the Earth’s crust.”