“It’s done! Let me put candles in it.” And there it is: sculpted waist as birthday cake. I promise to find her a willing ten year-old birthday girl (there are 10 candles) to blow them out at her next exhibit.

Suzanne is a deft and witty sculptor, but her paintings are equally impressive and serve an important function in her creative method. “When I want to rest and ground myself, I paint. I can really sit with it, and I feel like that’s where I should be most of the time, but sculpture and…installation work is so much more challenging to me.” I am fascinated by a painting staring at me from the corner, a photorealistic baby’s face spliced together with the terrible haunting eyes of a woman in a burka. Suzanne saw the two photos in a German magazine, and the disparity between the tender vulnerability of the infant and the hardened pained eyes of the woman made her want to meld them together. The effect is eerie and unsettling, and beautiful.

Shifting deftly between mixed media, sculpture, and painting, Suzanne chooses how to express herself based on what she wants to say. “In grad school, I was everyone’s worst nightmare because I jumped around with a million ideas and they were like, ‘Suzanne, you gotta stick with one! You can’t get a degree in five things!’”

But even this polymath approach is not without its own distinguishing hallmark: Suzanne likes a challenge. “I take on things that are big,” she says with a laugh. Her upcoming exhibition (Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, January 25th – March 6th), will feature a series of 12 sculptures chronicling different emotional and psychological states through the stages of butterfly development. The project will involve saris that Suzanne brought back from a recent trip to India, which have been made into elegant dresses by her crafty mother, combined with her trademark cement and hemp figures. It will also include a video collaboration, special lighting, and elaborate sets involving handmade wallpaper. She sees it more as a performance than an exhibit, and no doubt Suzanne can pull off the feat; she is already an accomplished working actor.

Painter. Sculptor. Needle-worker. Actor. “You don’t choose professions like this,” Suzanne chuckles, thinking about her huge family, all of whom are much more practical in their chosen vocations. At times, she wishes she could bring herself to paint landscapes or still lives, something easy on the eyes, so she could be a hit at family reunions again. But changing herself for others is not an option: “I don’t do this to make anyone happy, I do this because I want to talk about things that are important to me and how I see the world, my world. That’s all.”

To listen to the full-length interview and for more of Suzanne’s work, go to www.forthmagazine.com/suzanne-erickson. For more on her upcoming exhibit at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, January 25th – March 6th, visit 
www.chaffey.edu/wignall/upcoming.shtml.