This is my first post to the Heat Exchange blog. I’m excited to be part of this group and welcome comments to my post.
My name is Susie Ganch. I am an artist currently living in Richmond, VA where I am associate professor and head of the Metal Program at Virginia Commonwealth University.
My studio practice has been divided between collaborative community projects, namely Radical Jewelry Makeover, and my individual studio work that explores jewelry and sculpture. Currently, I’ve been working on 2 paths (in the studio): a series of work using non-recyclable plastics that comments on our habits of consumption,
the other a more refined series of enameled brooches, titled Soot Balls, that explore our responsibility and desire.
For the Heat Exchange exhibition I plan to combine some new ideas/pieces with the Soot Balls into a grouping of work.
3 things came together for this new current work that I’m making for Heat Exchange:
A number of years ago while teaching at Penland School of Crafts I began experimenting with die forming plates that were already enameled. Some of them were enameled plates from the scrap yard, such as dryer doors, or copper plates that I enameled myself. This started because I collected a piece of dryer door that someone had shot with a bullet. The hole, the rust, the stress fractures, were all beautiful and enhanced the surface of the enamel in such a way that I could never achieve through the pristine methods of sifting and baking enamel in the traditional ways I’d learned. My first tests were of bird dies. The cracks happened along logical lines mimicking the contours of the form. I was excited about them but work didn’t come out from this experimentation until now. Below are pictures of the shot dryer door and my samples:
Another thing that lead me to this current direction was a gift I received (also a number of years ago) from Christina Miller and Helen Carnac, two jewelry artists who work with enamel. They sent me pre-enameled steel plates with the challenge to “do something” with them. My samples in forming enameled plates seemed like the logical direction.
I’ve been filling my sketchbook with drawings and ideas for how this work might come about…
Recently I visited my friend’s studio to learn steel fabrication and welding techniques for some larger pieces that I’d like to explore. Hoss Haley had just finished working on some pieces using the sheet steel skins of washing machines and dryers, compressing them into spheres and stacking them into a random towering sculpture. Of course it instantly captured my attention for its use of materials and form, two things I have been thinking about (the pre-enameled plate) or using (spheres) in my own work for a while! When I returned to my own studio the first thing I did was create a version of his large sphere as a brooch. As an artist who makes both jewelry and sculpture, I have for a long time explored the differences and similarities between the two.
In making this brooch I was really struck by what I saw and thought. There is such an obvious similarity between my tiny brooch and Hoss’ sculpture and the conversation between the two compels me. One moves through space and time, one can’t. Both are privately and publicly experienced but in different ways. While I am having a private experience wearing a piece of jewelry, there is an obvious publicly shared view of how I look, feel, and represent myself to the world around me. When viewing a piece of sculpture, (Hoss’ is at the Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, NC), I have a private moment in a public space. When talking about audience, I also wonder which one will have more viewers: the one that moves through time and space, or the one that remains in one place? Both activate space: one on the body, one interacts with architecture. I won’t continue on this trajectory but suffice it to say, I began to explore the possibilities of this comparison combined with other perimeters (for making jewelry).
I’m on my way….
Here are some images of in progress work. I’m combining the distressed enameled plates with sugarcoated enamel, rubies and diamonds.
