Chronicle 2020

PROFILES

The patchwork of life SU RUSSELL 1960 By Katharine Brickman 2007

While biographies are often presented as a linear progression from one event to the next, Su Russell’s has had a more patchwork quality, much like the quilts she loves to make. For Su, quilting and crafts provide a counterbalance to the stresses of her counselling practice and serve as metaphors for the complexity of life. At Concordia University, Su studied fine arts and psychology, taking mostly night classes as she started her family. After finishing school, Su and her family moved to Victoria, and she supported her four children by working as a medical office administrator for 12 years. When she had the opportunity to take some time off, Su began to explore her artistic side. Su had always loved sewing, so she took a quilting class – “I was really excited about working with fabrics and colour and design,” she recalls, “I became transfixed.” Su became very adept at quilt-making and worked as a quilt artist for ten years, exhibiting her collection in North America and Europe. After a decade of full-time dedication to her artistic career, she was ready for her next challenge. Her counsellor mentioned an art project that she had been using with clients to help them open up. Su said, “I envy you being able to do that kind of work,” to which her counsellor replied encouragingly, “you could do this work too. Why don’t you go back to school?” “The seed was planted,” Su says, “although it took a couple of years to germinate.” Su completed a peer counselling training

program, then earned her master’s of education in counselling and began to establish a counselling practice in Victoria in 2003. Initially, she focused on trauma counselling for clients of all ages and backgrounds. More recently, Su has found that her clientele consists largely of older women who find her empathetic and relatable, especially when it comes to personal transitions like ageing, retirement, dealing with health problems and losing family members and friends. As Su concentrated on her counselling practice, she had unconsciously set aside her quilting. “I realized that the creative place quilt-making had filled in me and the satisfaction and sense of challenge it had given me had been replaced by the counselling work I was doing.” But Su also notes the similarities between counselling and quilting. In both, you “take pieces of people’s lives and put them together into something that makes sense,” she explains. Over time, she found that the intensity of providing trauma counselling to others was well-balanced by doing something creative and personal. Over the past 17 years of her practice, Su has taken up a number of different crafts in her spare time, including drawing, watercolour, basketry and clay work, as ways to “let my mind wander, as a break from having to be so focused on somebody else’s process and healing.” Now semi-retired, Su is planning to get back to quilting, after a nearly 20-year break, and already has some fabrics laid out on her desk in anticipation.

PHOTO: JOANNA ZOWTOWSKA

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