Some projects begin with a weather report. Others with a kitchen table, a box of family slides, a vessel of volcanic ash, or a walk along the lake.

I find a vessel of ash in Cholula on the day Chicago has the worst air quality in the world. I discover photographs of the aftermath of an earthquake amidst family photographs of picnics and graduations in my parents' basement. I notice how the wind makes itself visible by its impact on other things. I see the limits of welcome written into urban planning, restrictive housing covenants, and civic life.

I return to the things I can't leave behind.

My work begins with these encounters rather than a particular medium. They become questions I return to over months and often years.

Each project develops through its own forms of inquiry. Research and making unfold together through fieldwork, archival digs, experimentation, and collaboration across disciplines. The form follows.

Each project finds its own language. A painting. An installation. A sculpture. A photograph. A visual poem.

I bring lived experience into conversation with oral histories, engineering drawings, botanical illustrations, material inquiry, and other ways of knowing the world. I compose relationships.

Born in Mexico City, raised in Pittsburgh, and based in Chicago, I often work between landscapes, languages, and histories. I return to particular places, materials, and questions because they continue to reveal new relationships.

Every return changes what I see.

Biography

Susy Bielak (b. Mexico City) is a Chicago-based artist and writer whose work reimagines the social and political structures written into our environments. Working across painting, installation, photography, sculpture, visual poems, and collaborative practice, she develops long-term projects that move between intimate experience and larger environmental, social, and political conditions.

Her projects have ranged from drawings made with her breath to a happening staged on a seismic shake table, from engravings on kitchen tabletops to landscape-based installations and visual poems. Along the way, she has collaborated with rodeo cowboys, bus drivers, choreographers, engineers, scientists, musicians, and translators.

Bielak's work has been exhibited, collected, and published internationally, including by the Walker Art Center, Museo Tamayo, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, International Print Center New York, Poetry, Art Papers, and New American Paintings. She received her MFA from the University of California San Diego and lives and works in Chicago.