Hedges, Susan
Hedges, Susan
Bio Sketch
Susan Hedges (PhD, University of Auckland) is a New Zealand spatial design academic: Associate Professor in Spatial Design at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), where she has also served as Deputy Head of School, Art + Design, and previously as Senior Lecturer in Spatial Design in the School of Art and Design. Her research and publication interests embrace drawing, architecture, notation, film, and critical theory, connected — in her own formulation — by "an interest in the relationship between the body, surface and visual images" across these seemingly divergent fields. She writes on architectural drawing and interior surfaces, including "Interior Decoration to Exterior Surface: The Beleaguered Relief" (Interiority 2.1, 2017).
Key Works
- *The waiting room: Transitional space and transitional drawing* (2018) — Chapter 13 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic): the waiting room as transitional space and the waiting drawing as a marking of time, modeled through the Auckland Railway Station's ladies' waiting room and Sheet No. 24.
- "Interior Decoration to Exterior Surface: The Beleaguered Relief" (Interiority, vol. 2, no. 1, 2017) — on surface articulation and the wall as the point where art and structure converge and collide (not yet ingested).
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- waiting-room — the transitional space of suspension: "a point of mobility and temporary arrest, a place where the fixed and mobile converge"
- waiting-drawing — the transitional drawing that "marks time" rather than answers
- liminality — the room-scale liminal: the waiting room as "a peculiar limbo," "a threshold between stasis and movement"
- representation — the drawing against the plan as "a representation of space rather than time"; drawings as atmosphere simulators
- temporality — slowed time, the interstitial period, the clock's "thin duration" against thickened waiting time
- interiority — "pockets of unrelated and ephemeral interiorities"; the room's "unwitnessed existence"
- uncanny — the waiting room's "uncanny position within the larger scheme of the building"
Relevance to the Core Research
Hedges supplies the interior cluster's temporal-phenomenological register and a method for interior-architectural historiography practiced on a single drawing ("historical knowledge as an ongoing reconstruction in the present located somewhere between fact and fiction"). Her chapter matters concretely to the wiki's research areas: the ladies' waiting room is a gendered-space case in the transit interior ("a transitory space in a transitory building for women who wait," preserved by "etiquettes and excluding boundaries… a constructed possibility of privacy"), tying the Interior Architecture Reader's cluster to the Gender and Space research area; her Benjamin-grounded account of waiting and boredom extends the everyday-life cluster to suspended time; and her waiting drawing gives the representation cluster its theory of the drawing that marks rather than depicts time.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
