Artist’s Statement

Evoking frenetic cityscapes, dense sun-filled foliage, stained glass and contrapuntal musical motifs, Sue Oehme's recent body of work focuses on the use of color and shape to create structure and push visual space. She utilizes everyday recycled objects and etching plates that are prepared and inked with the print staff at Oehme Graphics to make complex, multiple-layered images that are strangely and vaguely reminiscent of hints of life in our super-charged, consumer-based, politicized culture.

After years of collecting various recycled materials from past artist projects in the print studio, Ms. Oehme realized the plan to utilize these elements in her new works. These consist of cut-offs from other artist’s stencils, miscellaneous flattened packaging materials, mesh produce bags, 6-pack plastic rings, textural wall papers, bits of acetate, coffee stir sticks, and various test plates with dry point, aquatint, hard ground and etching. Cast off strips of Solar plates which have been intentionally shattered to create random fractured patterns are a key structural element. Another main component, and sometimes the only one, is watercolor painted on vellum, which is then cut into various oddly shaped and not-quite-square pieces. All of the “plates” are inked with wiped or rolled oil color, and then the composition of the print takes place on the spot on the press bed. Almost every print is put through the press at least two times, to build up the density of color and trompe-l’oeil overlays. Once the printing is completed, the print is stapled to the flat wall in the studio, and then Sue spends up to 15 hours hand embellishing the final piece.

More recently, Sue has started to use the actual collograph plates, as well as the prints that come from them, along with other various ephemera, to create large site-specific collaged installation pieces, which are painstakingly pinned to the wall one -by-one, with color coordinated thumb tacks and map pins. These installations then lead to a new body of work, comprised of smaller pieces and plates collaged and glued together into floating varied shaped pieces. 

Of particular note are the interesting titles for Sue’s pieces. At the Oehme Graphics print studio, the staff keeps a running list of odd snippets from daily conversation and often a phrase will pop out to become the perfect title representing the intention of a particular piece. Some of the earlier pieces are parts of series all with the same title, and different numbers.

All of these works are filled with color, and are meant to represent the diversity and cohesiveness we find in ourselves and our community.

Sue Oehme 2020