Susan Else

Santra Cruz, California

Working in three-dimensional forms gives Susan Else’s work the appearance of something cuddly and cute. Look more closely though, and her political commentary comes through loud and clear. Her quilted figures have a message that viewers will appreciate along with the humor she injects into each piece.

Stealth art

The marvelous thing about working in cloth is that it often seduces the viewer into thinking the work will be “safe” and “comfortable.” I use this quality to create what I call “stealth art,” which pulls viewers in and then makes them grapple with uncomfortable issues.

My work often has a political overtone, but I try not to be too didactic or to point too many fingers. I figure we’re all responsible for what’s wrong in the world.

You can look at the piece When Ponies Dream as a comment on power relationships, for example, but it’s also a celebration of color, mechanics, and the flexibility of cloth as a medium. The ponies are having a wonderful time, even if the humans are a little downtrodden. The shopping figure in Consumer Confidence may be covered with little transparent skulls, but the useless items in her shopping bags are very seductive, and her latte is a complex piece of fiber engineering.

How I became a sculptor

In the late nineties, I was making abstract flat quilts, but even with those I was interested in conveying depth. Honestly, I think I just got bored with the flat surface, so I started adding abstract, cloth-covered, three-dimensional shapes to the quilts.

At the same time, Mike McNamara, a member of my quilt group, was creating a series of sculptures that he called the “It Dolls.” Half bird, half human, with long attenuated limbs, beaks, and crests, they were dressed and posed for a variety of circumstances: acting Shakespeare, singing opera, doing yoga, etc. They were marvelous, and I wanted to make some of my own. When my early cloth figures joined a framelike abstract shape on my design wall, I suddenly had figures on a stage.

I had never planned to be an artist, let alone a sculptor. I grew up in a family of artists, but I was the family rebel, determined to apply my textile skills and visual eye only in practical ways. Though I had already moved away from this rigid stance when I made my first figures, my sculptor mother was immediately ready to help me place my work in a fine-art context.

above: When Ponies Dream 31 x 31 x 40 inches, 2013 with detail

left: Consumer Confidence 24 x 17 x 13 inches, 2006 private collection

All photos by Marty McGillivray

Hard Times

15 x 35 x 20 inches, 2011

“Mom, I made some people!” “Oh, you mean you made some sculpture?” Not incidentally, she had also given me a lifetime of exposure to the process of creating figurative work.

Challenges of extra dimensions

The first challenge, of course, is figuring out how to make flat cloth stand up in the world, and how to create the myriad volumetric shapes the universe encompasses. But the technical challenges are part of what pull me through to completing the work. “How would you make a ______? Well, let’s try this. Or maybe I should talk to someone who knows about that.”

I have arthritis in my hands, and it showed up soon after I started doing the sculptural work. A couple of things have helped: I save my hands for working on sculpture, and I have modified all my tools. I use only spring-loaded scissors, the handles of my cutters and stuffers are all padded to keep my grip open, and I do my hand sewing with very thin curved needles that minimize the amount of gripping and pushing. I’ve extended the useful life of my hands longer than I ever expected. My energy and grip will run out before the ideas do.

Collaboration

Sometimes my work requires carpentry, a machine shop, or engineering skills I don’t have time to learn. Creating When Ponies Dream was a complicated process involving several people. I had enrolled in a two

Underwater

21 x 26 x 26 inches, 2010 with detail

week class at my local community college on how to make art for the Burning Man Festival—not because I attend the festival, but because I needed to know what was possible in terms of adding mechanics, audio, and lighting to sculpture. As a project for the class, I wanted to make a mechanical carousel to complement an animated Ferris wheel I’d already created.

The instructor, artist Patrick Stafford, was very kind in helping me figure out both the mechanics of how the piece might work and how to use the necessary power tools in the college’s machine shop to create it. During the several months I spent covering it with a quilted surface and making each human steed and pony rider, my husband, Marty McGillivray, refined the mechanics so they would actually work. He also found the carousel music.

I can’t talk about fabricators without mentioning my collaborator Iman Lizarazu, who is both a professional clown and a juggling-equipment fabricator. She has the skills for welding both metal and plastic, and she has helped me with several armatures that are outside my skill set—for example, the plastic frame for the circus tent and the mechanical elements of my Ferris wheel.

Circus series

I have embarked on a series of ten pieces having to do with the circus and the sideshow. The old-fashioned circus is a great place to explore the boundary between the splendid and the macabre, between the celebration of human prowess and a fascination with human mutation and peculiarity. I expect that this series will take two years of hard work, and I won’t be able to create much else in the meantime.

I love the “ah ha!” moment when I figure out how to make something work. I’d been working on a circus tent in which shadows of the old fashioned “freaks” move among more benign images of acrobats, jugglers, and trick riders. I was having difficulty getting the interior light and silhouettes to cast distinct shadows on the tent surface. It was wonderful when I realized that I simply needed to move the light source from the top of the tent to the bottom!

Advocate for my format

Fairly early in my SAQA membership, I wrote a letter to the executive director and the president of the

Family Life

38 x 20 x 20 inches, 2014

collection of San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles

board. Why, I asked, doesn’t SAQA allow three-dimensional works to be exhibited in its shows? I received immediate, thoughtful replies about how this was a venue-driven and shipping-cost related problem. Soon thereafter, I was asked to serve on a committee to address how SAQA could work toward inclusion, and now I’m on the board. Along the way, I’ve met up with a host of supportive SAQA members. I’ve always felt that my work was given a place at the table, and that my “squeaky wheel” approach resulted in action and inclusion by the organization. Being an advocate for my format in a supportive environment has helped me to define who I am as an artist.