Atlas Novus, 2021. Acrylic paint on canvas, adhesive, polymer, brass ring

After making work about Hawai‘i on the mainland for 30 years, Los Angeles–based artist Susan Maddux returns to her hometown for a residency with Arts & Letters Nu‘uanu and exhibition. Her goal is to reconnect to the island through in-situ work inspired by place and time.

Maddux makes large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas then folds and reconfigures them to transform the materials into wall sculptures that capture people with their unique forms and entrancing colors. She does extensive color work for each piece, which demands a complex process that can sometimes take months to get where she wants to go.

Separated from Hawai‘i and her family by the pandemic for more than a year, Maddux found herself deeply homesick for the islands and the very idea of “home.”

“I have a complicated relationship with Hawai‘i,” says Maddux, who has roots going back four generations on O’ahu. When she was living in New York in the 1990s and 2000s, she was always painting and drawing scenes of Hawai‘i.

“I’ve often felt like an outsider everywhere I’ve been. But I’ve come to realize that belonging is maybe a state of mind—and Hawai‘i is the place where I feel most comfortable.”

“Obviously I had a need to make work about Hawai‘i, to see and connect to it that way,” says Maddux. “Not being able to be there in 2020 made me confront what not having that connection means.”

Now she wants to see what she will create while actually working in Hawai‘i for the exhibition. Through the residency she plans to immerse herself in the color, texture, warmth and abundance of O‘ahu, and participate in traditional Hawaiian arts workshops organized by Na Mea Hawai‘i.

While she will let inspiration inform what work transpires, she has already decided to create three pieces inspired by places meaningful to her—Mānoa, where she grew up, Mokuleia and the Ka Iwi Coast.

Madduxʻs work was highlighted in the 2018, 2019 and (virtual) 2020 Los Angeles Design Festivals. In 2020, the Ace Hotel Brooklyn commissioned her to create work for its in-room curated fiber and textile art collection and to show in the on-site gallery in an exhibition opening in September 2021. She was featured in Luxe Art+ Design magazine for Southern California in January of 2021.

She is represented by LES Collection.