Her sculptures start with a basic form with ridges that she molds into a shape representative of what someone might find on a sandy beach, or at the bottom of the ocean. All of Susan Kayes works incorporate some kind of spiral pattern. This is the math that is found everywhere in the universe, and this is where Kaye finds her solace.
Kaye, of Madison, is exhibiting as part of Carnelian Art Gallery’s May-June show, Dreams In the Undergrowth. She is among six artists, whose pieces all have something to say about nature, climate change, mental health and the subconscious. The exhibition will go until the end of June.
“I breathe,” Kaye said during a visit to her Madison workspace earlier this week of how she begins her striking sculptures. “I take a breath. I try to feel my body in the space. For this piece, I rolled out clay. Now, it’s sort of a basic form and then I’ll start to really sculpt it and move it into a shape I want it to be.
“This is very tactile and I think about the ocean and about the way water forms mountains and canyons and the way water creates life and how life adapts to live in the ocean and to live in lakes and rivers and the way animals move through water. The way water moves. River grasses.”
The sculptor said the clay she worked with earlier this week was “particularly elastic.”
“It moves a lot,” Kaye said. “It will be black. It looks brown, but it’s going to be a dark brown that looks like black. After I kind of figure out what shape its going to be, then I’m going to cut it. It won’t be on a round base. It’s two pieces. The reason is because there’s air trapped in here. I want it trapped in here so I can push and pull on it without it getting flat. I want it to come out of the center. After this, it will do the first firing. This one is going to go in an electric kiln. I glaze it.”
In her studio, Kaye has several of what she calls “test tiles” that resemble different textures and colors.
“I ‘test’ them to see what they look like on different clay,” she said.
Having grown up in a stressful family dynamic, Kaye found what inspires her art at a young age, but didn’t start truly creating until middle school. Nature was her escape and a place where she could play, as well as leave her chronically hyper-vigilant state, which she called a lifelong challenge.
She attended university at Montclair State University in New Jersey where she majored in art and minored in dance. That’s where she first discovered her passion for sculpting.
“Eventually, I worked in a sculpture casting studio in Tribeca, New York,” Kaye said. “We had really amazing artists coming in. Our job was to make molds of people’s art so that they could then cast their work in bronze. We built a life size Pegasus. That’s somewhere on someone’s estate in Georgia now.
“I quit my job in a huff. I ended up working in a camping store and I discovered adventure-based counseling … rock climbing for personal growth and things like that. I worked in that for a while and went to graduate school for social work so I could open my own practice, which I never did.”
Kaye did, however, work for the Madison Metropolitan School District as a social worker. She said it was a “very rewarding job, but very hard.”
Of how her art evolved during that time, she said “I think my art got more personal and more about what was inside of me needing to be expressed and less about whether someone was going to like it.”
“I started making vases and trying to make different planes. And so I started making these lines on them. They always looked a little ocean-y or water-y. I decided I wanted to try things that you could hang on the wall.”
Of being part of Dreams In the Undergrowth, Kaye said she is “super excited.”
“When I saw the other artist’s works, I felt like I was in good company,” she said. “If you have an artistic gift, it’s your duty to share it.”
