Susan Allix Biography

Susan Allix

British

1943-

Biography

Born in England in 1943 Susan Allix comes to the book by way of printmaking and papermaking. She began as a printmaker, having studied at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s. She won a Prix de Rome which gave her the opportunity to study and live for a time in Italy. She created her first hand-crafted book in 1973.  After more than three decades and forty books, Allix continues to be true to her vision.

Because she insists on creating the entire book - from letterpress to illustration to binding - her work has a certain recognizable aesthetic; a malleable signature that responds to the particular character of a piece, but is still unquestionably hers. Allix conceives each book visually. 'I am concerned with visual things so I see books as full of colour and form in a pictorial sense as well as through the images created in my mind by the words, and through the sculptural qualities a book possesses.' The real narrative of her books is the flow of color and image as they move throughout the piece."

Her works are held in the collections of The British Library, Yale University, National Gallery of Art Washington DC, The Claremont Colleges in California, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Alberta, as well as other fine public and private collections.