Charleston artist Susan Klein has spent the last two decades developing a symbolic visual language. Her paintings and sculptures deal with cycles of birth and death, question the relationship between image and object and show how artmaking can serve as a conduit between the physical and metaphysical.
Klein, who is a 2020-2021 recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, received her master’s degree in fine art from the University of Oregon in 2004. Since then, she’s honed in on a multimedia practice that results in large-scale paintings on silk, glazed ceramic stoneware and more.
Now in her 40s, the artist and College of Charleston (CofC) studio art professor said she’s finding a new sense of freedom in her work.
“I can’t speak for everyone, but I think something happens when you turn 40, where you start to care less about your work looking smart or hip. You get this confidence to do what you really want to do.”
Abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning is quoted in 1963 comparing this phenomena to yogurt. He said in making art over a lifetime, “You’ve developed a little culture for yourself. Like yogurt, as long as you keep something of the original microbes, the original thing in it will grow out. So I had — like most artists, this original little sensation.”
Looking on the archive section of Klein’s website and her 20-plus years of artistic expression, it’s clear that the original sensations of Klein’s creations — a play between abstraction and representation, a blurry line between painting and sculpture, and a dance from image to object and back again — continues to exist in her current work.
Klein shares de Kooning’s sentiment, though she sees it more like a spiral.
“It starts out really wide, and as you get older, that spiral gets tighter and tighter. So there’s always that core, but you’re circling it and circling it … I feel like my spiral is starting to get tighter.”
Early influences
Growing up in Morriston, N.J., just 35 miles from New York City, Klein said she was exposed to art at an early age and took dance lessons as a child. Her father enjoyed playing jazz music. She was initially more interested in dancing than drawing and said the first time she was “awestruck” by a work of art was seeing the New York City Ballet as a child.
“Looking back, I can see that what I liked was how it was this movement that wasn’t about anything but the movement and the music—how that created its own language.“
And though she put her dancing shoes away a long time ago, Klein’s sense of physicality is still important in her visual work.
“I don’t like to sit and work. I need to move around a lot. What I loved about dance is that it’s something that you’re doing with your body in real time and taking up space. That interest in the physical is definitely part of the work for me.”
After obtaining her master’s degree, she started teaching at Portland State University in 2005, followed by a stint in Philadelphia and then a three-year-long position as a visiting professor at Grand Valley State in Michigan. In 2014, she moved to Charleston and started teaching at CofC.
“Teaching definitely influences my work, I think because it makes me stay open, it makes me stay critical,” Klein said. “I have to be really aware of what’s going on in art, and I have to know my art history. And I think it does keep me open to experimentation, because I always want to learn new materials or new things. I’m sure my studio practice influences my teaching, too.”
Developing a symbolic language
Klein said the “original sensation” of her artistic yogurt was born in graduate school when she started to create sculptures and make paintings from them.
“In grad school, I was really interested in making abstract work, but I didn’t really know how. I began making abstract sculptures out of foam and house paint and cut mylar and different things. Then I made paintings of the sculptures. Throughout my 20s, I continued that practice of making sculptures and painting the sculptures.”
This back and forth helped her develop her voice, Klein said, “and eventually, I was able to take out a piece of paper and start just generating abstract images. But it took a really long time to develop that language.”
When she was 38, she decided to learn how to build ceramic sculptures by hand. It is now a staple in her studio practice. Each body of work informs the next, Klein said.
“My work is really intuitive, but I also think intuition is connected to intellect. I don’t think it’s separate. Like when we have an intuitive gut feeling, it’s based on something, things we’ve already experienced or knowledge we already have … Every body of work feeds into the next body of work.”
And sometimes, creative decisions are led by necessity, Klein said. She’s spent the last year and a half painting on silk, so that she could transport it easily, from a residency in Wyoming to an exhibition in Berlin, for example.
A 13-foot-by-18-foot painting on the floor of her studio at CofC is filled with phallic and yonic shapes and flows with watery marks of color. It’s an offering, she said, “to the gods of creation.”
Devotional objects, offerings to the divine
Klein’s most recent work uses her symbolic language to channel ideas of creative energy and the ritualistic utility of art. In her paintings, she references ancient Egyptian and Roman funerary objects. One such object, which she found during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, included a finger-like shape, which Klein has since incorporated into her work for its “slippery meaning.”
“It’s sort of like a finger, but also a figure. And they could look phallic. I really like that with a symbol system, things can mean really specific things. But then there’s also like a slippage, where the meaning can slide. So I started to play with that form a lot — as a way to think about the relationship between fingers and making … creative energy and its relationship to sexual energy, that kind of great creative force that’s in all of us.”
And so like the ballets she enjoyed as a child, where movement was made about movement, Klein makes about making.
“I keep coming back to the sensorial, the tactile; what does it feel like to move through the world? How do we make sense of the world? How do we learn through touching?
“That’s where the ritual comes in, in the repetition of creation to serve some other purpose. Making becomes a sacred act, one that’s in reverence to the sensorial. It becomes a spiritual practice. It’s something I come back to again and again — to understand, translate, search and discover.”
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