About
Susan Ann Shepler
Artist · Writer · MA Counseling Psychology
Certified Transformative Language Artist
AwakenArts began through a long practice of working with language, image, and symbolic form. The works are shaped from language itself, where poetic structure and figure carry meaning together rather than one explaining the other.
Each work begins as a poem before any visual structure is considered. Through revision, rhythm, spacing, repetition, and arrangement, the language gradually gathers into visible form. The shape is not imposed afterward. The words construct the figure.
The resulting works form a non-linear path through symbolic experience, tension, conflict, longing, recognition, and awareness. The figures are not fixed symbols with single meanings. They approach human experience through layered forms that often hold opposing realities at once — innocence and performance, beauty and fracture, fear and grace, concealment and revelation, strength and vulnerability.
Many of the works emerge from recurring patterns found across personal experience, culture, story, faith, inward conflict, and symbolic life. Rather than offering fixed interpretation, AwakenArts approaches these figures as forms to encounter, reflect upon, and gradually recognize.
We live among symbols whether we notice them or not. Images shape memory, stories organize identity, and language itself can take visible form. AwakenArts explores these realities through symbolic poetic forms, readings, and literary encounters shaped through image, figure, tension, and awareness.
The work draws from poetry, parable, allegory, archetype, and symbolic form while remaining attentive to the figurative language found throughout Scripture.
Susan holds an MA in Counseling Psychology from Webster University. She is a Certified Transformative Language Artist through the Transformative Language Arts Network and also earned certification as a Journal Instructor through the Center for Journal Therapy in Denver, Colorado.