[6][7][8][9][10] Sensemann is known as a versatile and prolific creator, whose ideas have led her to explore diverse painting materials, media (drawing, photography, collage, performance), subject matter (architectural, botanical, biological and organic forms, self-portraiture), and styles from abstraction to realism.

Sensemann continued to show internationally and throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Roy Boyd, Artemisia (both Chicago), Fay Gold (Atlanta) and Locus (St. Louis) galleries and the Evanston Art Center, among many.

[11][4][20] Sensemann describes her approach to art as "expansive, holistic, multi-focused, and non-hierarchical," and cites the influence of feminist artists such as Hannah Höch, Eva Hesse and Harmony Hammond, as well as Italian Renaissance painters like Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi and Bellini.

"[1] In the 1970s, Sensemann focused on small egg-tempera and oil paintings of feminist archetypes such as Salome and Magdalene and "fantastic landscapes"[22] of dense, brightly colored botanical imagery that flirted with both realism and abstraction.

[26][27][12] Painted in reds, cranberries, tangerines and aquas, works such as Eguchi (1983) employed geometric organizations of architectural planes, light and shadow that created ambiguous space, yet anchored complex, scoured impasto surfaces described as "painstakingly textured, almost sculptural relief.

"[28][8][21][16] Critic James Yood suggested Sensemann's "churning brushwork, intense colors, stippled surfaces, and abstract symbology" signified a pursuit of higher knowledge through the methods of modern art.

"[30] The looming U.S. Gulf War focused Sensemann in a more discordant, political direction in her "State" series (1990), which used geometric shapes to reference gun sights and targets, and thick paint application to create flux through shifts of light and vantage point.

In a subsequent series of 600 collages,[35] she embraced strategies of juxtaposition, fragmentation and rupture, reflecting the alternative influence of Hannah Höch, Meret Oppenheim, Martha Rosler and writer Susan Griffin.

[14][1] Probing them with a politically incorrect sensibility, she compiled taxonomies of highly gendered images that offered fresh readings and satiric, sometimes disturbing commentary on roleplay, stereotypes, misinformation and "masculine" art.

[1][38] Carefully superimposing photographs she took of organic substances over intimate close-ups of her face, she merged with flora, seaweed or cacti in "De-Monstrations" works such as Hide (1998), producing grotesque and seductive alterations to her flesh that suggested decay, ravage or regeneration, endured with a facial expression of impassivity.

[3][39][6][40][41] These works, created through non-digital means and ultimately numbering more than 700, recalled cultural constructions of symbiosis between women and nature and were interpreted as meditations on the transience and the ephemerality of life, the passage of time and its effects, and notions of beauty, eroticism and glamour.

[6][42][3] In the "Impersonations" works, whose titles reference masquerade and the role of surface in mapping identity, she explored her "unbridled urge to merge with unfamiliar and unknown,"[43] fusing with marble busts, statuary, Roman murals and decorative objects to take on a range of characters: Buddha, temptress, princess, king, gnome, monster.

[39] The images often probed transgressive realms of the imagination at the edge of identity, as in Slice (2001), which effects an alternating, reciprocal exchange of feminine and masculine between Sensemann and a fierce Bacchus countenance on an Italian serving plate.

[39][45] Sensemann returned to more abstract art in the 2000s, with several bodies of large-scale, baroque works in which accumulations of small marks, dots, dashes or blips collide and overlap to create dizzying fields of complex patterns.

[43] Suggesting micro- or macroscopic investigations of disparate biological and social structures—cells, tears, stars, populations—the holistic surfaces maintain a fluctuating balance of definition and diffusion, qualities glimpsed in Sensemann's earlier "Sheer" and "Lace" series (1995–8) and fantastic landscapes, which also featured shallow spaces and concentrated patterning.