BIOGRAPHY

Susan Jamison (b. 1965, Willimantic, CT) makes egg tempera paintings, drawings, textile-based sculptures, and installations investigating the intersections of femininity, ritual, and the natural world. She holds an M.F.A in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received the Award of Excellence, and a B.F.A. from James Madison University. 

Her paintings have been published in numerous books and publications, including Taschen’s Library of Esoterica: Witchcraft, The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic, Unravelling Women's Art: Creators, Rebels, & Innovators in Textile Arts, and New American Paintings (three volumes). 

Jamison has received several honors, including a fellowship from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation for a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2009), the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Foundation Grant for Painting (2014), and a Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2020). Her works are held in the public collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Mint Museum, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University, and Longwood Center for the Visual Arts. 

Her solo exhibitions include the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Spanierman Modern, Taubman Museum of Art, and Amuse at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Selected group exhibitions include those at Nancy Margolis Gallery, Tucson Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Jamison lives and works in the mountains of southwestern Virginia.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I approach painting as a quiet devotion to the unseen, the sensuous, and the sacred cycles of life and decay. My work is animated by the belief that the Earth herself is a living being with spirit, breath, and voice and that we, as creatures moving across her skin, are part of her dreaming. Through layered egg tempera paintings, textile forms, and symbolic installations, I illuminate the invisible threads that bind all living things together.

I have visions of a woman re-wilded. They spring from my lifelong, intimate connection to the natural environment. Early in life, I learned the language of plants, birds, and wildlife on long walks into deep forests. I grew attuned to the sacred significance of spotting a fox, an orb-weaving spider, or a rare trillium. Field guides became my companions, decoding the living world around me. These memories and my profound sense of the sacred embedded in nature continue to shape my imagery.

My work meditates on the tension between attraction and repulsion, growth and decay, beauty and discomfort. My paintings evoke the moist, breathing, complicated presence of the Earth: the texture of wet soil, the delicacy of ephemeral wildflowers, the slow bleeding of life into the material world. My figures and compositions hover in that charged space, inviting viewers to feel the push-pull that animates all existence.

Using egg yolks and dry pigments in a process that feels alchemical, I infuse the material of life itself into each painting. My intricate egg tempera works celebrate the Divine Feminine, the beauty of flora and fauna, and "the girly”, a reclamation of feminine power and agency through lush, symbolic visual languages that blend naturalist illustration, folklore, and personal mythology.

In 2023, I attended a residency at Mountain Lake Biological Station in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. In the old-growth forest, I encountered a decaying fallen tree affectionately named "The Mothership" by biologists studying its microcosm of life. This meeting filled me with renewed wonder. My most recent paintings, lush with water-soaked ferns, moss, and unfolding flowers, are in response to this living monument of death and renewal.

Through my focus on nature, ritual, and embodied reverence, my work acts as a quiet yet persistent call: a reminder of the deep interconnection between the feminine spirit and the breathing Earth, and an urgent advocacy for her conservation.

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