Today we’d like to introduce you to Susan Barbour
Hi Susan, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
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.
Part of the reason I wanted to work with light was that I wanted to create this experience for other people. I envision a huge exhibit at a museum lined in plush carpet, where people can just fall on the floor and stare at these divine feminine beings just buzzing.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
When I first started showing my drawings and asking for guidance, people sometimes belittled them. A few artists (typically not women) told me that the power of my drawings lay in how ephemeral they were and that I shouldn’t try to preserve and sell them–it was as if they wanted my art to go down the drain!
I was also told that they weren’t fine art because I was doing “the same thing in the same way, a bit like basket weaving.” With all due respect to basket weaving, he seemed to be telling me I wasn’t making art. Imagine someone saying that to Gustave Klimt. I was also told not to enlarge them or translate them to neon because the nature of my medium was “tiny and delicate.” As you can see, I didn’t listen!
An exhibition breakthrough came when a famous artist walked into a gallery and bought one of my drawings for a handsome sum. Not that I needed his validation to continue my creative practice, but it inspired me to seek more opportunities to exhibit and sell my work.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I make neon light drawings inspired by female nudes that I draw with my hair on the shower wall. I developed a process to first transfer the hair drawings to paper. Then I scale the line drawing into large format sculptures. 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.
Thanks to Lili Lakich’s instruction, I was able to realize my vision for these divine feminine forms: now I’m able to code for all the breaks and bends in the tubes as well as the placement of the supports and the background. I chose a luminous white tile for the background, which is not only an homage to their original inception but it refracts the light so that the figures glow with a luminous aura and colorfield. I stare at them for hours at a time. They simultaneously elevate and ground me–just as they did when I was first drawing them in the shower.
I’m also known for my work with and around scent and human body odor. I have a background in poetry, wine, and perfume. I do performance art pieces and private consultations where I smell a person’s natural aroma and then reverse engineer their scent using a portable version of my perfume organ or scent lab.
During these sessions, uncanny things often come up: I smell things in people’s past or present, and layers of shame often dissolve. I give people liquid vials of the key aromatic notes I find in their unique bodily aroma, and when they smell the scents in combination, they and everyone else–including partners and family–flip out; it’s exactly what their clothes smell like. These sniffing events are emotionally empowering and revelatory experience every time. I even reverse engineered the scent of my friend’s dog once, and now she says it comforts her whenever she’s away from home!
I also have a public version of this piece that I’ve done in museums and galleries. I set up a confession booth and have participants line up to sit with me, across a screen window, and hold their underarm against it. Then I proceed to smell and describe their unique bodily aroma to them as if it were a fine glass of wine. I hear people tell me that I changed their lives all the time. But I don’t think I have any superpower. It’s just that we live in a deoderized society that has duped people–mostly women–into thinking that their body’s natural scent is unacceptable. If you do a google image search for “Odorono,” you’ll see that the first deoderant ads were part of a malicious ad campaign that preyed on women’s insecurities. One hundred years ago, no one saw a need to cover one’s (recently washed) body odor. My hope with this piece to give people their humanity back. I’m also convinced the subtle smells of human presence are grounding and elevating and that we are all communicating things all the time through our chemistry–you can learn more about this work in my TEDx Roma Talk “I Smell Human.”
Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Just that the world probably needs you deeply and more than you think! A lot of my art practice developed from days where it feels difficult to get out of bed or believe in a happy future. But following the instinct to lose myself in some sensory activity– a “scent walk” where I smell every bush and flower in sight, or drawing with everyday materials and focusing on the sense of touch–this got me out of my head for just long enough to experience incredible stretches of joy. There’s a lot of scientific research around sensory experiences and how they can help us circumvent unhelpful patterns of thinking.
I wish these stretches of joy for everyone!
Pricing:
- $10,000 – neon light drawings
- $1500 – 1 hr body aroma session with reverse scent engineering
- Original Hair Drawings – Price available upon request
- $2500 – Intaglio Prints made from my hair
- $60,000 = private signature scent creation
Contact Info:
- Website: www.susanbarbour.net or www.susan-barbour.com
- Instagram: @susanbarbourartist
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SusanBarbourArtist
