Etched in Green

Susan Groce is “an etcher.” She’s also a teacher and administrator and fiddle player. Each week she leaves her home in Port Clyde, and her studio that backs up against six miles of woods, to drive to Orono, where she has taught drawing and printmaking at the University of Maine since 1979. Actually, she has been their one-woman print shop. These days, however, she is consumed with her duties as chair of the art department and a multiphase building project.

Growing up in a suburb outside of New York City in a family with a membership to the Museum of Modern Art, she was encouraged to pursue whatever interested her. When she attended Interlochen, a premier music camp, in junior high to study the violin, she took her first etching class. And there was no looking back.

Groce often works in series, both in Port Clyde and Orono, creating pieces that may be as long as 21 feet if she’s working in her studio, which is bigger than her house. Although she sees herself as an etcher, she also creates mixed media drawings of pastels, color pencils, acrylic paint, regular pencils, graphite—what she calls fairly simple, direct materials.

As someone “having fun breaking rules,” she shakes us up and forces us to view things from a different perspective—sometimes by means as simple as re-creating visual elements or using “on-site materials” like pigmented dirt, and others times by much more complex architectures of space and time.

She has been a visiting artist and lecturer at places as close to home as the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland and as far away as the School of Contemporary Art in Perth, Australia. The recipient of many grants, fellowships, and awards, her work is in many private, public, and corporate collections in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Singapore, and has been included in over 170 solo and group exhibitions, both in the U.S. and abroad.

In the 1990s, Groce was instrumental in converting the University of Maine’s print shop in Orono to what she calls “safer” practices, generally referred to as “nontoxic” practices. It was one of the first institutions in the country to do so. Around the same time, she co-created (with Friedhard Kiekeben) what is now called the Orono ground. A ground is an essential part of the printmaking process, and the Orono ground was the first flexible ground where the quality of mark and texture was fine enough. It is now used internationally.

Over the years she has traveled to, and worked in, accessible places like Edinburgh, Scotland, and remote locations like the Australian outback, where she must be flown in by mail plane or a mining company plane. That travel, combined with her immediate world, her meticulous pocket-size journals of notes and sketches, and her photographs, continues to feed her work, which she hopes to have a large chunk of time to concentrate on—sometime in the future.

That’s quite the commute—Port Clyde to Orono. How did that come about?

I came here to teach in 1979 and shortly thereafter I met my husband-to-be. His home was Port Clyde. For many, many years we had a commuting relationship, and it’s still pretty much functioning that way.

Plus you’re an artist actively making work, a researcher, designer, teacher, and now an administrator. How do you maintain balance?

[She laughs.] I’m totally unbalanced. There are only so many hours in a day—even though I do try to elongate time. It’s a constant struggle. That’s my biggest challenge. One of the reasons I keep lots of notebooks is because there are so many ideas that I can’t get to. They follow me everywhere. [She pulls out a small black notebook from her desk drawer. The pages are densely packed with drawings and writings.]

Since you are constantly moving back and forth between two places, where do you make your work?

The larger pieces, the more complex things, I make in my studio, but I’m always working on lots of pieces.

At the same time?

Yeah. For me it’s much more functional. As I back myself into a corner in one piece, I can start working on another, and solutions keep rising up.

Did moving to Maine influence your work?

My work started being more about the environment, and yet I was using all these toxic materials. I was having a hard time justifying making my work because of the materials I was using. So I ethically had to do something to resolve that issue.

Did you ever think of not working with them?

Oh, sure, but for me it wasn’t good enough to switch materials. I had to be able to switch without a loss of quality and with increasing possibilities. It didn’t happen right away. Now, if you were a museum curator, you would not be able to tell the difference between an acrylic-resist and a traditional-materials print.

You made UMaine one of the first nontoxic print shops in the country. How toxic was printmaking before that conversion?

Well, I like to say we’re employing safer processes now. But you’re right. We were talking things like nitric acid, central nervous system depressants, with carcinogens. Very toxic. Etching can be one of the most toxic of art forms. You’re using things like triple three trichloroethylene. Heat that and you make phosphine gas. Now we’re using acrylic grounds and photopolymer films. Everything is much safer.

You’re not only a printmaker, so how do you decide what medium you will use for a piece?

I choose the medium according to what the idea is. Some ideas as they take shape need to be big pieces, and for those I tend to work with mixed media drawing. I layer materials much in the way I layer ink in making prints. Some things work out better as prints—it’s in the nature of the subject, the time it takes to work through the concept. Printmaking is a more lengthy process. But I have a printmaker’s sensibility all the way through.

And by that you mean?

It’s the specific qualities of the line and tone. The sort of marks that you make, the way you can layer marks. There’s a real graphic sensibility. I’m not a painter. No wet gooey stuff for me.

Your drawings are often elaborate, complex interconnections that seem to dip into a deeper place.

The dynamics are meant to take viewers out of their typical perspective. That’s why a lot of things are angled. You’re being put off balance, to nudge you somewhere else. Where that is, I can’t tell you. But they’re meant to be meditative and self-reflective. And so for each person, it’s a totally different experience. And sometimes I take recognizable icons and I lift them out of context to undo what is time bound, place specific. A lot of my work deals with the provisional nature of matter and things that happen over environmental time, or with elemental forces. Like rain, wind, fire, or human interaction.

Why the presence of both the macro and micro in so much of your work?

I am looking often at what happens on the edge of visibility, and they’re usually the really, really big things or the really, really tiny things. And those things affect everything.