Suzanne Erickson interview

Suzanne Erickson is constantly surprised to find that she is just like her parents. “I used to get really freaked out when my dad would dig for junk. I’m exactly like my dad now,” she laughs. “I drive through the alleys of Beverly Hills looking for someone else’s garbage.” Suzanne and I are sharing a couch in her studio that might have been garbage itself, were it not for her magnificent reappropriation, inscribing the upholstery with a florid patchwork of paint and needlepoint. She tells me this sort of transformative creativity is inherited from her mother—a woman who would disassemble a bed and convert it into a wet bar in the scant free hours between ferrying Suzanne to and from day school.

Suzanne’s own crafty manipulation of found objects has resulted in ununexpected and inspired creations. Recently, rather than dispose of her old mattress, she felt the deeply personal connections literally imprinted on its surface should be decorated and put on display. The result is captivating: an intricately embroidered Eastern goddess figure surrounded by a fiery array of pinks, fuchsias, burgundies, and crimsons; its vagina blooming from the center of the giant fabric canvas like a peacock’s plumage.
“[It] looks sexual, because it is a woman with her feet above her head and the whole vagina exposed”— maybe Suzanne is not her mother after all—“but it’s really not about that.” For Suzanne, the power of womanhood is simultaneously sexual and maternal. “To be whore and the mother, that’s the goal, isn’t it?” Suzanne laughs. The magenta inscription forms a semicircle arch around the mattress, and it reads, “We all enter the world through a woman’s womb and we leave through the gateway of death. Praise the woman!”

Suzanne works in diverse media, but she stole my heart with the Fragile Series, a collection of figurative sculptures. The piece that drew me in is a seated female in scarlet red, mournfully yet purposefully staring down, her figure tense but beautiful, coated head-to-toe in the slick glossy red of Garbo lips. No wonder—she is actually made of lipstick, 150 sticks to be precise, pressed over a cement-and-hemp armature. Suzanne originally planned the sculpture to sit atop a mirror, gazing down like Narcissus. Instead, she sits on a wooden crate marked “Fragile,” lending that theme of vanity and self-obsession a brittle tenderness.
The Fragile Series is Suzanne’s exploration of isolation and loneliness. She is candid, if a tad self-conscious, about the personal nature of this work. “I don’t want you to paint me as this fragile little [thing] but I am! I realize that’s who I am. It’s a blessing and a curse.”

It would be a stretch to describe Suzanne as a fragile person; any sign of her fragility is eclipsed by a fierce sense of individualism and purpose. Take “Fuck the Flock,” another sculpture from the same series of a female figure with no arms and a black crow’s head. The idea for the piece came to Suzanne when she noticed flocks of crows in the parking lot of her studio, and marveled at how they always managed to stick together.

“I can’t be part of the flock. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to be a part of society, or I’m rebellious, but you gotta be so strong, you gotta be yourself. Whatever that is.” This stubborn strength is manifest in her crow-woman, knees and feet stained with dirt (she has scraped and clawed to get here), but her back straight and her gaze calm. The contrast between the raw pink fleshiness of the figure’s human body and the helmeted security of its crow’s head is a visual essay on Suzanne’s own push and pull between vulnerability and independence.

It is easy to take Suzanne’s work too seriously—heady themes, confrontational forms—but titles like “Fuck the Flock” and pieces like “Chair” and “Finally” show her playful side. She describes “Finally” as a work of “complete frustration.” After building layer upon layer of this female figure, through seven incarnations, Suzanne still found herself grappling for the perfect form to illustrate her thought. “I finally ended up cutting her off, and just showing her crotch and ass,” she guffaws. What remained was a sawed-off mid-section exposing her process layer by painstaking layer, like the rings of a tree revealing its age, like a birthday cake. So, Suzanne slapped on a layer of white resin ‘frosting.’

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Forth Writer