Susan Haas Morrissey was born in Lidgerwood, ND. While she has lived and worked out of the state since 1972, she and her husband returned to North Dakota in 1996 from Chicago to reside and work in Valley City. Morrissey received her Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of North Dakota, her Master of Arts at the University of Louisville, and her Master of Fine Arts at Indiana University. Her work has been exhibited in a significant number of invitational, solo and juried national exhibits throughout the country since 1979. Her work can be found in university, corporate and private collections in the United States, Great Brittan and Australia. Morrissey's work included two and three dimensional pieces.

Artist Statement:
I have been working as an artist and exhibiting my work for over 25 years. The resulting body of work, I would call a visual journal. While it is a large material and physically cumbersome accumulation, I none the less consider it a journal. It remembers who and where I was at 20, recalls whims and dreams of my youth, it reveals how I thought as a woman, mother, daughter and spouse, and what it was like to live and teach in a large city and in a small town. It records my thoughts of political issues that touched my life and of lost family and friends.

As a young art student I wanted very much to draw from within myself and acknowledge what I found there to be worthy of setting down on paper or canvas. The truth within me at that time, didn't seem to be profound enough to be called art. Fortunately I recognized over the years that my feelings of life; the joy and pain, peace and anxiety, elation and desperation, are what life is about; and what my work came to be about. On my internal hard drive, is stored a repertoire of emotions and images, always at the ready for my use; the mix and match of which often delights me, amuses me or leads to something more profound.

About 7 years ago, I tried my hand with a new medium, ceramics. While I had worked sculpturally before, the effort was generally an adjunct to a two dimensional piece. The sculptural characters I'm creating are not unlike those which frequent my paintings. A series of horns which blow a soulful sound were followed by a series of women, the latest pieces now have the whimsical strangeness of recent paintings. I consider moving between the two mediums to be advantageous to both.

Susan Haas Morrissey
Figment Studio
Valley City, ND
701-845-8958
Muirgheasa@aol.com