Susan Mollet employs five works in her exhibition in the Forum Gallery at Brookhaven College, June 6 - August 4, 2014. All elicit an elegiac tone that extends beyond the particularity of individual, private, loss to a broader engagement of the question of what remains of love after the loss of the beloved. Beginning in the circumstances of loss and of personal memories of what was once presence, the works give form to absence, in a terrible and poignant beauty.
One evening, after my mom died, my sister and I ended up sitting on the floor going through boxes of old pictures of her. I was especially drawn to the ones depicting her life before kids...before she was mom. The images are digital decals, made from the original pictures, fired onto porcelain. Boxes are made of stoneware.
The Japanese term "yonobi" refers to a balance between beauty and functionality, to find beauty and spirit through the usage of common objects in our daily encounters. I'm increasingly interested in exploring that balance of beauty, curiosity, and functionality, as seen through this work.
Letters Never Sent is comprised of personally written letters silkscreened onto porcelain, procelain, written to people who are no longer in my life, saying things I wish I had said to them when I could. Most of the text is unreadable to the viewer, as the importance is not in the actual words.
"Rocks, Stones, and Smooth Pebbles" were made while I was in an artist-in-residence program in Vallauris, France,inspired by the black and white marble used in the Siena Duomo in Italy and the smooth water-worn dark rocks with white lines and circles found on the beaches in France.
Sometimes life affords you an extraordinary experience that enriches you and your perspective in ways that unfold. Turkey on a Fulbright study grant. The making of these pieces gave me a chance to reminisce, reflect, and relive the time I spent in a country I came to love and respect for its diverse landscapes, extraordinary natural beauty, rich history and welcoming people.
To say that I have tried to recreate places or times is not exactly true. Many of the forms are intuitively made and may simply reference a site or an event, a mood or a feeling that is apparent only to me. Some of the text I have incorporated is taken from a collective journal written by the group, each person chronicling two or more days of the journey. Most pieces reference the abundant ancient stone ruins, stone walls, mysterious mounds not yet excavated, and rugged landscape. But all are a grasp at making permanent that which is an incredible memory for me. From this country of extreme contrasts I came away with textures, colors, forms, friends and images that will always stay in my mind.
Susan Mollet's installation Happy Birthday consists of 169 ceramic boxes arrayed around the gallery walls. The boxes are small; none are more than three inches in their longest dimension. Glazed an intense lime yellow-green with a red overglaze of geometric and text elements, the boxes continue Mollet’s incorporation of textuality into ceramic objects, while differently deploying the form of the ceramic object as signifier. __ written by David Newman, Gallery Director... Mounted on the gallery walls, the boxes are in the physical space of the gallery, their three-dimensionality emphasized by the shadows they cast on the wall. This physicality matters; it is a co-presence with the viewer. The boxes are in three staggered rows centered at the artist’s eyelevel, with additional boxes placed well above and below eyelevel. The boxes are open on the top, their hollowness declared by the die-cut paper packing material filling and emerging from them. In the physical space of the gallery, the boxes are present but in wrapping around the space, are not all-at-once present in simultaneous availability to the viewer’s perception. In not being simultaneously available to perception, the perception of the boxes qua objects, like their surfaces and the glaze pattern and text applied to the surfaces, requires a temporal duration for reception. Reception is of what is given, of what is presented. Presents, perhaps especially birthday presents, are always personal, and thus are essentially private, some thing presented by one person to another. We place the present in a box, packed carefully and wrapped festively, to denote its specialness as a gift. Multiplying a box for a present qua object 169 times, and arraying these objects around the gallery walls, shifts the inherently private act of gift-giving to the public domain. The texts incorporated by overglazing onto the objects are likewise shifters from the personal to the public domain, signifiers of a content that is contextual. Within the public domain, the individual subsists as a locus instantiating the political. This is evident in the work on scrutiny of the dark blood-red glazed texts referencing stem cells, and their application in the treatment of cancer. Marking and celbrating the artist’s brother’s fight against cancer, the title of the installation, Happy Birthday, from the hospital’s reference to the day of his stem cell transplant as his “new birthday.” The work, and particularly the texts glazed onto the surfaces of the boxes, engages the field of discourses surrounding stem cell research, and is thus positioned at the liminal zone between the individual and private, the public and political. Indeed, simply in its installation within the gallery, the work has transited this liminality to enter the political, as do all artworks on being presented. The inference that all artworks are political, engage such fields of discourse and occasions of conversation as they may, follows from this. That also is not a small present.
Even as a kid I collected objects, always enjoying the variations on one theme, mostly with rocks and leaves then. But the idea for this series began as I was observing my own collection of old oil cans. I noticed their quiet and understated sense of beauty and economy of line and form. I became aware of the spouts and bodies as line against volume and variety within unity. There were figural implications as well as interplay of forms and negative and positive space. Then I found myself referencing these to a time in my life that was much more quiet and simple, as they were.
My artwork is autobiographical and often cathartic in nature. Each series stems from a personal event or situation with a connection primarily expressed through objects.
I work is exhibited in solo, group, and invitational shows and can be seen in a variety of publications. Among other opportunities, she has participated in a Fulbright-Hays study grant to Turkey and Artist in Residence program in France. Susan resides and maintains a studio in Dallas, Texas. She holds a B.S. from Southwestern University and the M.Ed. and M.F.A. from Texas Woman’s University.
Inspired by retirement, I have begun to revisit the medium of metal for some of my artwork. I work with silver, steel, copper, and aluminum and continue to bring the idea of everyday objects into my pieces.
