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Susan Boardman began making her “embroidered narratives” while exploring the lives of Nantucket women in their journals and letters in the archives of the Nantucket Historical Association. Through a familiarity with her subjects’ words, drawings, and artistic creations, she developed an intimacy with their lives that served as the catalyst for her own designs.
Susan Ruckstuhl picked up a needle when she was five years old, and, with help from her mother, stitched her first piece of embroidery. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1968, Susan became serious about needlework as a form of self expression. She enrolled in the Extension Course Home Study offered by the Nantucket School of Needlery, founded by Mary Ann Beinecke, after viewing an ad in the Boston Globe. She went on to earn a master’s degree in education with an emphasis in textile arts and later took an Advanced Professional Study certificate at the American Institute of Textile Arts at Pine Manor College, where she also served on the faculty.
Susan first visited Nantucket in the summer of 1974 to participate in a “Nantucket Needlework Seminar” offered by Erica Wilson, an expert English embroiderer who was an island summer resident.
In 1989, the Boardmans moved to Nantucket. Immersing herself in the community, Susan began volunteer work at the Nantucket Historical Association. Reading and indexing the whaling journal of Susan Veeder, who accompanied her husband, Captain Charles Veeder, on a voyage in the Nauticon from 1848 to 1853, Susan was inspired to make her first embroidered narrative, “As Seen from Ship Nauticon,” completed in 1998.
Susan’s subsequent narratives were scaled down in size but equally intricate; each took between two hundred and four hundred hours to complete.