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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." Collis is carrying two mugs of hot tea from her kitchenette. She gives one to her visitor and seats herself with the other on a royal blue office chair. Her East London studio is crowded with chunks of wood she’s using in some new pieces. Laid out on her worktable are sheets of mother-of-pearl that she will use for her delicately inlaid sculptures. Above her desk a child’s painting is pinned alongside a photograph of a pile of junk. It is a fittingly unpretentious environment for the down-to-earth Collis. At 54, she doesn’t fit the cliché of the "emerging artist," and in a world that too often privileges the young, her artistic journey stands out. In 1995, when she was 39, she left a successful publishing career as a production manager to start making art, training first at London’s Chelsea College of Art and Design and then at the city’s Royal College of Art (RCA), from which she graduated in 2002. Collis’s profile has risen steadily ever since, with numerous gallery shows to her credit and her selection by the Armory Show to create the visual identity for this year’s edition of the fair.

Sitting with her mug, she seems a bit astonished by her success. Her first love was literature — she talks passionately about Brecht — the fine arts came later. "I met my husband [Peter Collis] 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. At first her pieces can be hard to discern. For her breakthrough 2007 exhibition, "Don’t Get Your Hopes Up," her London gallery, Seventeen, seemed empty, as if it were being prepared for the next show. Drips of paint stained the wood floor, screw holes awaited filler, and a soiled broom leaned casually against the wall. But in this underwhelming mess, treasures awarded closer inspection: The screw anchors were made of gold and topaz. The paint spatters, actually an artwork titled Rock Bottom Riser, 2007, turned out to be rounds of mother-of-pearl delicately set by the artist in the floorboards like jewels in an engagement ring. And the broom — Waltzer, 2007 — was adorned with such gems as black and white diamonds, turquoise and freshwater pearls. Indeed, with Collis things are never what they first appear to be. On Vacation, 2008, which was made for "Sweat," her second exhibition at Seventeen, in 2008, looks like a cheap all-purpose nylon shopping bag abandoned on the gallery floor, but its detailed green-and-red allover plaid pattern has been meticulously re-created by hand on paper (Collis says she finds such repetitive drawing "soothing"). Each discovery in a Collis show is a little epiphany. Visitors stop being viewers and become associates, intimately linked to the artist by a shared secret.

These thrilling moments of revelation are by-products of Collis’s dedication to celebrating the unnoticed. At the RCA, she was always "looking at the sorts of things that you would walk by and ignore — studio furniture and equipment, things like that," she says, adding that she was also "looking at artists who tried to dematerialize their practice, like Gordon Matta-Clark and Daniel Spoerri. It’s funny to think that now, because I’ve ended up having such a material practice!"

Her works at college used embroidery and drawing. "They weren’t precious so much, except that they had a lot of time put into them," she recalls. Her very first illusionistic piece, 100% Cotton, 2002, was a pair of coveralls seemingly splattered with wall paint. "I was going to paint them. But at the time I was thinking about this whole idea of truth to the material, and I thought that it would be really nice if the marks could be thread, like the fabric of the suit." Lacking any sewing skills — Collis freely admits that she is a terrible seamstress — she started stitching and experimenting with trompe l’oeil. "When I took the coveralls to the crit," she continues, "it was really funny, because nobody knew what I was talking about. We had to stop, and everybody went to have a look at them. I realized I was onto something." Like the gold screws dotting the walls of "Don’t Get Your Hopes Up," the embroidered blots drew attention to the behind the scenes of art and exhibition making. "Production is art’s dirty secret," Collis says. "What I’m mainly concerned with is all the stuff that goes on to facilitate the display of everything."

That 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 deconstruct it. Works from her first solo show at Seventeen like Long Gone, 2007, with its neat alignment of turquoise and smoky-topaz screw anchors, and Made Good, 2007, an 18-carat white-gold screw set in black onyx (such pieces are typically made in editions of no more than 10) evoke fictional situations, posing as the leftovers of an exhibition that never took place and alluding to the activity of technicians who’ve never entered the gallery. The ghostly artworks that once supposedly filled the empty walls hover above her own creations.

The public is often bemused by Collis. "I’m happy when viewers approach me to inquire where the work is or if it’s on display yet," says Seventeen director Dave Hoyland. "We even have angry viewers accosting us, telling us that we are lazy and insulting to display a pile of refuse. How dare we! It’s up to us to encourage a closer viewing."

Challenging the viewer in that manner is at the core of Collis’s art. "I really wanted my first show to look as if it was totally empty," she says. Using gold and diamonds is her way of interlocking contrasting concepts: precious and worthless, worked on and casual, full and void. Collis’s highly desirable works paradoxically function as an antidote to the spectacularism that has defined a large part of art production during the past two decades. Some institutions and individual patrons have understood her project and supported her from the start, including the U.K. Arts Council Collection and the Zabludowicz Collection, in London.

If Collis has become associated with costly materials enlisted in the depiction of the obscure, her oeuvre is really much more varied. "Sue’s practice has always been very broad, but people tend to focus only on certain types of works," notes Hoyland. Collis makes crucial use of drawing, too, as demonstrated in "Substance Misuse," her series of obsessively drawn marks interrupted by "splatters" of paint.

Collis’s reduced aesthetic makes her the appropriate choice to create the visual identity for the Armory Show, which opens this month. Her designs for the show — which will include her signature screws and holes as well as a rag with a stain woven into it and a lithograph — will "weave around and be integrated to other artists’ works in the booths," says the Armory’s executive director, Katelijne De Backer, adding that Collis’s "attention to detail will make for a memorable aesthetic for the fair, and her playful tweaking of viewers’ expectations will remind us to look beyond the surface."

Perhaps to distance herself from the solipsism that threatens any self-reflexive practice, Collis has recently moved from art-related detritus to scraps from building sites. Unlike her previous approach of adding elements to an existing object, Collis now replicates ordinary bits of timber using rare woods, such as ebony, walnut and white holly, as well as precious stones, including lapis lazuli. Forever Young, 2009, for example, is an arrangement of "paint-stained" planks and pieces of twisted metal lying on the floor (created with bird’s-eye maple, mahogany and platinum, among other materials). Collis’s studio is littered with tracing paper, used to make faithful reproductions of the spots on her salvaged lumber. "The accidental is really hard to invent," she explains. "It’s much more efficient to copy a real drip of paint to create the illusion." These are no trompe l’oeils, though; their "fakeness" is offered up. "For me it’s a really exciting departure, because the finished objects have more of a hyperreal look," says Collis. If her barely noticeable gold screws quietly exalted the overlooked, then this new body of works elevates the mundane.

"Susan Collis" originally appeared in the March issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2010 Table of Contents.