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“I’ve always wanted a creative life,” says Susan Collis. “But being an artist wasn’t something that I’d ever, ever planned.” In a world too often privileging the young and emerging, Collis’s artistic journey stands out. She left a successful career in publishing to start her training at London’s Chelsea College of Art and Design, later continuing at the Royal College of Art (RCA). “I met my husband when I was in my 30s,” she confides. “He’s an experimental filmmaker,and I think it was he who really introduced me to the idea of ‘making.’”

“Making,” for Collis, means drawing attention to the craft behind the art, and it is crucial to her practice. Often her pieces are at first hard to discern. For her breakthrough 2007 exhibition, “Don’t Get Your Hopes Up,” her London gallery, Seventeen, seemed vacant, as if it were being prepared for the next show. Drips of paint stained the wooden floor, screw holesawaited filler, and a soiled broom leanedcasually against the wall. Yet in this under-whelming mess, treasures awardedcloser inspection: The Rawlplugswere made of precious stones,and the paint spatters turned outto be rounds of mother-of-pearldelicately set in the floorboardslike gems in an engagementring. Each discovery was a littleepiphany. Viewers stopped beingoutsiders looking at art andbecame associates in the know,intimately linked to the artistby a shared secret.

Collis has been creatingthese thrilling momentsof revelation since graduatingfrom the RCA, in 2002.They are the by-product ofher dedication to celebratingthe unnoticed. “At the verybeginning, I was trying tomake work that was quiteinvisible. It was very sitespecific.It was when I wasat college, doing my MA,and I was looking at the sorts of things that you would walk byand ignore—studio furniture and equipment, things like that.”As in most of her earlier works, the hallmarked gold screws dottingthe walls of “Don’t Get Your Hopes Up” intentionally drewattention to the behind-the-scenes of art and exhibition making.“Production is art’s dirty secret,” Collis says. “What I’m mainlyconcerned with is the background to display, all the stuff that goeson to facilitate the display of everything.”

It may sound as if her main goal were to lay bare art’s illusions.But Collis’s pieces mystify the creative process as much as they deconstructit. Works such as Long Gone (2007), with its neat alignmentof turquoise and smoky-topaz Rawlplugs, and Made Good(2007), a hallmarked 18-carat white-gold screw set in coral, evokefictional situations, posing as the leftovers of an exhibition thatnever took place and alluding to the labor of technicians who’venever entered the gallery. The ghostly artworks that once supposedlycrowded the empty walls hover above her own creations.

The glamour of the materials that Collis employs has oftenobscured their actual raison d’être. “I really wanted my first showto look as if it was totally empty,” she says. “I thought, ‘How canI find a material which is so opposite to this?’” For Collis, usinggold and diamonds is a way of interlocking contrasting concepts:precious and worthless, elaborate and casual, full and void. “Atcollege I was really looking at artists who tried to dematerializetheir practice, like Gordon Matta-Clark and Daniel Spoerri,” sherecalls. “It’s funny to think that now, because I’veended up having such a material practice.” Collis’shighly desirable (and collectable) pieces paradoxicallyfunction as antidotes to the spectacularismthat has defined a large part of art production inthe past two decades.

“The early works started out with embroideryand drawing. They weren’t precious so much, exceptthat they had a lot of time spent on them,” shesays, recalling her very first illusionistic piece, executedduring her MA studies at the RCA, composedof two embroidered boiler suits seemingly blottedwith paint. “I was going to paint them both. Butat the time I was thinking about this whole idea oftruth to the material, and I thought that it wouldbe really nice if the marks could be thread, like thefabric of the suits.” Lacking any craft skills, shestarted stitching and experimenting with trompel’oeil. “When I took the boiler suits to the crit,”she continues, “it was really funny, because nobodyknew what I was talking about. We had tostop, and everybody went to have a look at them.I realized I was onto something.”

Perhaps to distance herself from the solipsismthat threatens any self-reflexive practice, Collis hasrecently moved from art-related detritus to scrapsfrom building sites. “Sue’s practice has alwaysbeen very broad, but people tend to focus onlyon certain types of works,” complains her dealer,Dave Hoyland.

Unlike the freshwater-pearl-adorned broomWaltzer (2007), in which she added elements toan existing object, Collis’s current pieces replicateanonymous bits of timber using rare woods andprecious pigments. In her studio there is tracingpaper everywhere; each stain is faithfully reproduced.“The accidental is really hard to invent,”she explains. “It’s much more efficient to copy areal drip of paint to create the illusion.” These areno trompe l’oeils, though; their “fakeness” is offeredup. “For me it’s a really exciting departure,because the finished objects have more of a hyperreallook,” says Collis. If her barely noticeablegold screws quietly exalted the overlooked, thenthis new body of works elevates the mundane.

"The Hyperreal World of Susan Collis" originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2010 Table of Contents.