My assemblage sculptures are epiphanies—a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely or commonplace occurrence or experience. I examine social and cultural issues, whether critically or humorously, and use my resulting thoughts and feelings for my work.

 

Most of the materials in my assemblages are recycled, repurposed, reused, or rescued. Fascination with the discarded, forgotten, cast away, lost and insignificant flotsam and jetsam of life began in early childhood. My father was a commercial fisherman, and my mother a casual housekeeper, frustrated with thwarted attempts at tidiness. My playground was filled with fish nets, lobster traps, massive ship anchors, boats, glass ball floats, shells, tar barrels, hemp ropes, and swordfish bills from my father’s gathering and storage, and string, yarn, buttons, catalogs, dishware, pruned branches, and discarded clothing and shoes from my mother.

 

As a child, I constructed playhouses and rickety forts utilizing all the fascinating pieces, gleaned from the garden and empty lots used for fishing gear storage. All the supplies, gear, leavings, gatherings and junk in the yard, stacked and sometimes overgrown with weeds, were available and ready for my imagination without reservation. I gleaned from neighbor’s garbage cans, street side leavings, construction sites. I can remember finding a baby’s cot mattress by the curb, and running off with it as the garbage man yelled at my retreating back, the mattress bumping along behind me. The more absurd, used or unidentifiable the piece, the more possibilities it offered to me.

 

However small (a string of plastic pearls, a scrap of candy wrapper, my useless wedding band) or large (grocery cart found by the side of a residential street, a shiny new box mattress innerspring-do you see a pattern here?- leaning against a San Francisco North Beach apartment building, pieces of

an old weather beaten wood shed), I knew all the pieces had one common relationship: all had been useful or precious at one time, and were now junk. Expendable. Throw-away.

 

My philosophy behind the assemblage sculptures is the knowledge that our lives consist of one common thread: time. The majority of us trade our most precious commodity – time- for money. We take this money and buy things. Sometimes the basic needs in life, as food, shelter, clothes, and care, but also many things. The more we are paid for our time, the more things we purchase. Eventually the things are discarded. Suitcases, fur coats, fake jewelry, books, wedding dresses, stuffed animals, wigs, house ware items, suitcases, cars, furniture, whatever. Look at the plethora of second-hand shops, charity stores, and e-Bay activity. We are throwing our time - our lives- away in return for things we eventually discard.  Essentially, and without much forethought,  we discard our lives.

 

The first time I saw Edward Keinholz’s Back Seat Dodge – ’38 in the Los Angeles County Museum

of Art I felt uncomfortable and fascinated at the same time. It was uncomfortable sexual imagery, yet familiar for my personal life at the time. The audacity of using discarded products to present a story reflected the altar pieces on the lower floors of the museum, from pre-Christian to current times. It was too close an allusion to be ignored. This courageous act of sculpture, and subsequent knowledge of his other pieces, planted seeds of interest in assemblage sculptures.  Keinholz gave me the opportunity to realize it was acceptable (in some worlds) to save and collect, but to revive the discarded and redundant, and recycle it into my own personal and universal epiphanies. The wasted life of the discarded had a new beginning.

 

My assemblage process is intuitive and an additive process. I found the poignant cardboard suitcase in The Emigrant, and the find instantly revealed the whole piece to me. The remainder of the objects to complete the piece were resourced over a short period of time, perhaps a week. All the objects were begged, given or found. The Black Widow (Fifth Wheel) and Excess Baggage were assemblages that grew from a thought and were assembled and built over a longer length of time. Many of my sculptures are biographical, as Guinevere’s Tears, Parents, California Memories and Cormac. I use wedding dresses to symbolize the hopes, dreams and expectations inherent in the wedding ceremony, and the sadness I experience when the dress ends up in a thrift store or discarded. Sharp objects, as pins, needles and nails, are symbolic of piercing pain. Natural materials, as pine cones, wood and seeds, are used to illustrate fleeting life and decay. A piece may be completed in a short period of intense addition or over a long period of time, as the piece evolves in response to its parts.

 

I use these discarded and usually deemed useless objects to give them a second chance, and also to tell a story. I offer these things, these moments of your life spent, back to you as the record of your life, and the symbols of what was once important to you – returning as epiphanies in your lives.

 

 

 

 

Susan Hazard

Artist Statement