Artist Suzanne Husky is accomplished in a range of disciplines including drawing, sculpture, tapestry video and land use regeneration. Her artistic practice is therefore multifaceted, but all her creations are driven by one clear focus: To amplify hospitality toward more-than-human beings within ecosystems damaged by human exploitation of nature. Ecological concerns are thus the guiding purpose behind her work.

After graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux in 2002, she began in horticultural landscaping at Merritt College in Oakland, California, then in permaculture with writer and ecofeminist activist Starhawk and later in herbalism and agroforestry with nonprofit Arbre et Paysage 32 in the Gers department of France. Over the years, S. Husky ‘s research-based practice aims collective greater understanding of dynamics of the living world.

Noticed in 2017 at the Jeune Création art fair in Montrouge, France, for La Noble Pastorale, a tapestry subverting the famous Lady and the Unicorn, S. Husky’s work draws on references from art history, giving them a new scope and unsettling our overly accustomed ways of looking. She also often draws her materials directly from exploited landscapes with a view to telling their stories. With this approach, the politically engaged ecofeminist seeks to create a visual culture that resonates with grassroot struggles.

Observation, depiction and transformation are inextricable from each other in S. Husky’s art, which is firmly anchored in life. It regenerates soils and rivers, calls out destructive policies and germinates revitalising imaginations and heterotropic alliances. The subjects she portrays are never disconnected from the land that gave them birth; each exhibition activates dialogues with local scientist, specialist as well as local activism, an ethical principle that the artist calls prise de terre or grounding.

Her works thus take such diverse forms as a musical commemoration for deceased factory-farmed poultry (Requiem for 25,000 Chickens, 2015), a tapestry depicting a police officer’s murder of a farmer (Jérôme, 2018), apothecary jars decorated with medicinal plants (Pot d’Apothicairesse, 2019), a food forest in a rural area (Aux Arbres, 2020), podcast on the intersections between mythology and agroecology (Ma Mère l’Oie – et Autres Histoires de la Terre, 2021–2022), a manifesto for an agriculture of love (Manifeste pour une Agriculture de l’Amour, 2020) and since 2020, low tech process based stream revitalisation.

S. Husky often works in collectives, her works emerging from encounters with activists, naturalists, philosophers, inhabitants and artisans and giving rise to multiple transdisciplinary collaborations. In 2016 she and artist Stéphanie Sagot created the Nouveau Ministère de l’Agriculture (New Ministry of Agriculture), a fictional French institution that, until 2023, staged the immutability of French agricultural policies, which, since the 19th century, have been built upon a productivist and industrial ideology, regardless of the government in power. In 2024 her collaboration with philosopher Baptiste Morizot led to a book titled Rendre l’Eau à la Terre. Alliances dans les Rivières Face au Chaos Climatique (Actes Sud), which was followed by the founding of nonprofit MAPCa (Mouvement d’Alliance avec le Peuple Castor pour des Rivières Vivantes) devoted to deploy nationally low-tech process-based regeneration.

Since 2008, S. Husky has regularly exhibited her work around the world: in San Francisco, at the YBCA (2008), the De Young Museum (2010) and the international airport (2017); at the 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019); at Warsaw’s modern art museum (2020); and in France, at the Transpalette de Bourges (2021), the Lyon Biennial (2022) and the Drawing Lab in Paris (2024). She has completed numerous residencies in France, including at La Caza d’Oro in Le Mas-d’Azil (department of Ariège), Pollen in Monflanquin (Lot-et-Garonne), Nekatonea in Hendaye (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) and the art and design centre La Cuisine in Nègrepelisse (Tarn-et-Garonne). In 2021 she was awarded the inaugural Choi Foundation Contemporary Art Award, which supports ecological creativity, and in 2023 she won the Drawing Now Prize.