Down Home Girl Studio is owned and operated by Suzanne Sawyer.

In my work, I explore themes of duality, identity, and anonymity through sculpture, handmade paper, books, drawings, letterpress printing, and printmaking. Through each of these media areas, I explore my interest in human relationships. Particularly, I am interested in how we are known by others and ourselves, how we perceive one another, or even how we might wish to remain unknown or disguised. I have been developing a visual language for naming common threads in my experiences. Images of turning shoes, cows, rhododendron, pea pods, and many others have been prevalent in both my two- and three-dimensional work.

In my three-dimensional work, I have been examining plant forms as metaphors for relational concepts. For example, we can be incongruent or indistinct in how we think and feel versus how we communicate our thoughts and feelings to the world. Inspired by the physics experiment known as ‘Schrodinger’s cat’ I became interested in how people sometimes navigate through various polar opposite states in life or sometimes even exist in both states at once just as Schrodinger’s cat was both alive and dead at the same time. We might experience joy and sorrow almost simultaneously, as Kahlil Gibran wrote “they are inseparable,” we experience one as the other waits in the wings. However, we may only share one of those states with the community around us even though both might be true to our current experience. Rhododendron embodies that duality in that it signifies a water source when hiking, but it is also poisonous to burn – it is life and death simultaneously. I have created a series of sculptures using handmade paper in which overbeaten flax fiber was used for the leaves of the rhododendron plant and abaca fiber for the buds. The natural shrinkage of the fiber as it dries causes the wire armatures to curl into very life-like leaf shapes.

The motifs of my sculptural work also appear in my prints, drawings, and artist’s books as I layer text and images to express similar ideas and themes. For example, turning shoes are one prevalent symbol. A simple act such as someone turning my shoes around so they were easier to step into became a metaphor for being known – his care in such a trivial matter demonstrated his posture in the relationship, his desire to know me. The collection of motifs in my work is constantly expanding with my daily experiences in community and in the world in general, so the opportunities to continue work on this path are endless. My ideas are often inspired by the simplest of daily activities, taking a walk for instance, so the environment and people I encounter eventually become a part of the visual language in my work. In all of my work, I reference memories because they demonstrate a connection between dual states – my past and present. For example, I reference a sense of connection to the geography of my youth with images of ginseng, birdhouses, bluebirds, and rhododendron. Other symbols such as the pea pods, cairns, and turning shoes, are each inspired by a specific memory or particular interaction in a relationship.

For many years I worked in social work and taught high school art, while pursuing my studio practice on the side. I have learned a great deal and am grateful for those experiences as they fueled my work and my work informed my teaching. A little over a year ago I left full-time teaching to pursue an advanced degree and full-time studio practice. It has been a thrilling, life-giving genesis to a career as an artist. I am taking the time and space to incubate my work – a time to develop, refine, and focus on it single-mindedly.