Susana Cereja's journey begins with architecture, but she always remembers how she used to draw and to paint during her childhood. She studied architecture from 2011 to 2016 in Lisbon, Portugal, and during a small period in Germany. While taking her degree in Architecture, at the same time, she studied Illustration and Drawing at the Faculty of Fine Arts, also in Lisbon, and started working as an architect in the studio of a Portuguese artist, where she worked for five years. She also studied printmaking in Barcelona; Arraiolos in Lisbon; and Drawing at Ar.co - Center for Art and Visual Communication, in Lisbon.
Her artistic project became public in 2017 when she started to share it on social networks and on her website. Susana's project communicates through three main techniques: engraving, Arraiolos tapestry and plaster. Probably because she came from an architecture background, Susana Cereja is passionate about the beauty of the materials and likes to take them out of context and to innovate with them, placing them on a contemporary level. She loves to put her whole soul into her works and to make a difference with the message she conveys and/or techniques she constantly innovates with, wether it’s through mixture, context or use - something that mainly happens in the Arraiolos tapestries (an ancestral Portuguese technique, which the artist works on a daily basis).
Some might think that the artist asks someone to make her tapestry panels, from drawings she produces and that could result in a tapestry or a canvas or a sheet of paper. But the truth is that the artist not only designs each tapestry as if it were an architectural project, but also knows how to materialize the tapestry/project.
Her work is "emotion". The artist works and studies this subject because she feels that we are educated in so many subjects other than emotions. "People don’t know how to deal and work with their emotions.". For this reason, the artist likes to talk about the deepest emotions and anxieties of the human being. The Woman theme is also very present in her work, once again through emotion but also with the purpose of breaking paradigms.