Toronto-based Susan Warner Keene has been working over the years refining the use of age-old technologies that have been central to her image making.  Originally felt-making principles governed her output and now for this exhibition, papermaking processes have fed Susan's interest in the built object, with satisfying results.  She has been able to garner much attention and many accolades for her work.  In 1991 Keene was awarded The Prix Saidye Bronfman Award for Excellence in the Crafts.

Keene's talent is in working within the physical parameters of papermaking and pushing the technical boundaries, allowing her to create objects that go against the established notions of how paper should be and act.  Paper is intended as a stable support that receives imprinted marks or information.  For Susan the encoding is built into the work as a result of such mundane concerns as shrinkage, translucency and surface texture.  There is a great deal of effort that the works undergo in order that they appear effortlessly as part of a natural world to her devising.

"Mimesis" is a phenomenon of the natural world in which one organism takes on the characteristics of another for a variety of reasons related to survival: usually the entrapment of prey or avoidance of becoming prey.  Susan feels that she has been involved in some version of that process with the flax transformed from fibre to membrane, to relief that can be 'read' with the eyes or by touch.  She thinks of the transformative process as effects of experience, time, and biological change and as a result Keene produces work that has a certain delicacy and poised quality. Most of the works appear as juxtaposed elements, in pairs, referring to the Western codex form of the opened book in format and 'readability'.  Susan Warner Keene's paper constructions take on an authoritative presence that require close attention to the details and invites the viewer to puzzle the relationship of the parts to one another in making up the whole story.

These are objects that are crisp and levelheaded, as well as seductive and sensuous, and enigmatic at the same time.  Definitely, worth the experience.