Suzanne Mathew is an associate professor of landscape architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a registered landscape architect with a multidisciplinary background in biology, architecture, and landscape architecture, and her work draws on cross-disciplinary approaches to measure and visualize the phenomenological qualities of landscape space. The methods she has developed join visceral experience and technological survey to create depictions of landscape that capture its sensory, temporal, and volumetric qualities all at once.
Her design and research practice is multimodal: her studies are comprised of field work, visualization, and writing. She develops methods for measuring and observing environmental phenomena using weather instruments, geospatial mapping programs, photography and video, and then uses a range of drawing and modeling techniques to translate these observations into drawings of sensory phenomena. The outcomes of this work are being used to develop new terms and theories for how we perceive space when we are outside. The drawings she completed during the MacDowell residency are evidentiary and will be used to discuss the nature of interiority in outdoor space.
