Press
“I’m surprised, too, that even though the concept of “drawing in space” has been around since Spanish sculptor Julio González articulated the idea in Cahiers d’Art in the 1920s and ‘30s, only one sculptor so far—Susan Bennett—has brought the practice up to the present.”
Ann Landi, Visari 21
04/19/2020
Wiscasett gallery defies expectations with "Abstractions"...the results is a gem of a show...
“Inspired by twisting rhythms of organic sea and plant life, Susan has created an environment converging light, air and stainless steel rod, dissecting space into an organism of abstraction.”
Bob Keyes, Portland Press Herald
07/15/2019
“...In Anima, 2010, Susan Bennett takes shining stainless steel and forces it into something fragile, tendrilled and tremulous, merging the organic and the industrial...”
Lilly Wei, juror, ARTnews and Art in America, contributing editor
“...In the lush botanical garden, a few miles away...Susan Bennett's Anima (2010), a suspended assemblage of snaking stainless steel cables, seemed right at home installed in a dense tropical setting...Sculpture Key West showcased some intriguing talent working outside the confines of urban art centers and blue chip art fairs.”
ARTnews
Ann Landi, contributing editor
June 2011 Issue, Reviews: National
Reprinted with permission from Milton Esterow, Editor and Publisher of ARTnews
“...To produce an object that manipulates space, dances with the light, and honors the substance from which it is made and avoids the mundane is a small miracle...
...among the work presented are three sculptures...the pieces are accomplished in stainless steel and are small in scale...to produce a piece say, 15 inches high with sufficient stature to command an independent position in space is an accomplishment...I have in mind Bennett's Ice Cube Series #6. It is a construction with Cubist roots, architectural references and monumental intentions...there is an intensity that would survive great enlargement...As an industrial material, it does not have the cachet of bronze or marble. When given a subdued patina as in the Bennett piece, it may overcome the inference of inferior material and convince the viewer of it's integrity. It does so through a subtle surface mellowness...Bennett is so successful at it that it would be difficult to think of her pieces with any other surface.”
Maine Sunday Telegram
Phillip Isaacson in the Arts
February 20, 2011
“Bennett was inspired by weathered, broken twigs that carpeted a clearing in the woods...she toted home a sackful of twigs, sorted and dyed them and reassembled them into sculpture, giving new life to dead objects...in Bennett's Moon Tree, charred looking twig fragments float again in mid-air, wrapped in wire branches of a large tree sculpture. Composed of steel and wood, the tree looks alive, organic, bent to one side as if by prevailing winds.
Expectations and demands, coiled tight and carried uncomfortably in the gut might resemble the steel balls shaped by Bennett last winter on the forge in her barn studio. Layered like balls of string or coiled barb wire, once tightly wrapped, the basketball sized spheres are depicted in initial stages of unwinding. Loose ends lift off into space; strands near the center repel one another. The objects' energy are released, flung out into the gallery space and the breeze we imagine feeling as they pass by is enough to frame this disintegration as an invitation to new possibility.”
The Portland Phoenix
Jenna Russell
9/14/2001