We recently connected with Susan Barbour and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Susan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I began my career as a female nude – literally as an artists’ model – and now I draw female nudes with my hair – our human antennae – and I use the shower as my studio. There was no precedent for learning this craft, no guarantee my creation would even escape the drain.
And yet I persisted out of the sheer ecstasy of creating and witnessing a creation come forth; in this sense the craft is as old as witchcraft.
It’s what anyone who’s ever sensed divine femininity has felt: a bolt of pure light and love seeking to be grounded.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Twenty years ago, I walked into a life drawing studio and asked if they were hiring models. I needed the pocket money to support my poetry habit. The studio told me that as a model I would get to draw for free, so I always say began my arts education “on both sides of the easel.”
When I was modeling, I would pick a spot on the floor or the wall where I could fix my gaze and so steady my pose. Soon I was afflicted by pareidolia, or the tendency to see patterns where there are none. I began seeing faces and body parts in wood grain and dimples in the plaster. One day, years later, I was taking a shower and fallen strands of hair came loose in my hand. I smeared them across the wall so they wouldn’t go down the drain. I looked and saw the clear image of a woman’s elongated back, a chignon at the nape of her neck. With a few strokes of my finger, the rest of her body soon appeared. And so I began using the shower as my studio.
Eventually I developed a method for transferring the hair from my shower wall to drawing paper using a piece of adhesive transparent film that water colorists use to protect their paintings. I exhibited and sold these drawings to collectors–and still do. But I also knew that paper wasn’t the final destination for these drawings.
The thing was that when these female figures appeared to me (I never began with an image in mind but rather move my hair around until a woman appears to me), they felt so luminous and larger than life that I knew I had ultimately had to work with light. I made my first 7ft neon at my studio in SoHo, New York with the help of a fabricator, and when I moved back to LA I took a neon fabrication workshop with Lili Lakich in the Arts District.
Now I’m exhibiting and selling a whole series of these luminous goddesses and installing them in collectors’ homes. The final neons have an ambient quality that creates a whole aura and colorfield. You can gaze at them for hours—just as you would look at a sunset or light on water. They cause a shift in perception and consciousness.
I’m planning a solo exhibition with the floor lined in plush carpet, where people can just fall on the floor and stare at these divine feminine beings and bask in their glow.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
That women everywhere know their true power and that we as a society will honor them and insist that they be the ones who draw their own lines around their bodies!
Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?
Nothing is more Non-Fungible than mitrochondrial DNA in hair : )
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.susan-barbour.net
- Instagram: @susanbarbourartist
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SusanBarbourArtist
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susan-barbour-artist/
