"My love affair with fabric began with my first memories of the clothes my mother made me, recalling exact hues, fiber content, and weave. My mother taught me to sew, carefully and creatively. My father always had a pencil in his hand or behind his ear, drawing on napkins in restaurants and painting on the weekends. He inspired and encouraged me in art. My education in molecular biology and medical illustration still figures in my work with an underlying sense structure and organizing principles. My current work is about relationship, color-to-color, shape-to-shape, pattern-to-pattern. I revel in the joy of placing one fabric next to another."

BIOGRAPHY

Sue Benner is a fulltime studio artist creating art quilts and other dyed and painted fabric constructions since 1980.

Sue was born in 1955 in Iron River, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and was raised in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. While attending the University of Wisconsin – Madison and majoring in molecular biology, she took two electives that would change the direction of her life: fabric design and art history. Many more art and science classes followed that led to an M.A. in Biomedical Illustration from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Since then, she has sold her work through galleries and dealers throughout the United States. Her work is shown internationally and is in many corporate, private, and institutional collections. She has designed installations for architectural spaces in fabric and other media. Her art quilts have appeared in numerous juried shows, such as QUILT NATIONAL, VISIONS, and QUILT NIHON.

Sue is known for her brilliant dyed and painted textiles, her bold, expressionistic style, and underlying sense of order.

She teaches inspirational and technical workshops and gives lectures on her work and life as an artist. Sue paints, draws, and sews in her custom-built studio behind her home in Dallas, Texas, where she lives with her husband and two sons.