One of the earliest art-making tools Susan Day had was the cardboard she saved from the inside of her father’s dry-cleaned shirts. Perfect white surfaces for a child to draw on. As a youngster she made paintings, collage, and furniture prototypes and in general, was very crafty. In her youth, having moved over thirty times across three continents before settling in Canada, Day developed a great sense of direction by connecting the locations through mind mapping that generated many different kinds of memories that evolved through the years into some of the images and structures of her work now. It was this kind of thinking, observation and living that informed Day’s growth and evolution in the arts.
She started to study art at Bealart in London, Ontario, as a teenager, where Bevan Ling, who ran the ceramics department, was an early influence. He helped Day begin to truly appreciate ceramics. Along with drawing, ceramics was a form of working and creating that developed her ability to begin to navigate the world during a complicated adolescence.
Other older artists she met modeled what it meant to create and to be an artist. Describing herself as a blank slate at that age, Day says she took all they had to offer and all that was around her, observing, listening and reading many different books and philosophies by numerous authors.
She developed her techniques with clay and ceramics, sculpting and pushing two dimensional arts into three dimensions. To her, these materials represented the human body itself as soft and pliable, and alternately brittle and fragile. Inspired by her mother, who had passed, and her mother’s physical disabilities, she drew on the clay to illustrate the physical form in its strengths, frailties and vulnerabilities.
Telling the story of herself and her family through this work brought success but also stress. Day shifted to more decorative arts for a time until she took a beginner’s pottery class to find some relief but was “outed” in the class, after three weeks, as the fine artist who had shown at the Embassy Cultural House and The Dia Foundation. Soon after, she was given the opportunity to do a large ceramic mosaic which opened the doors for her and since then she has created one large-scale ceramic piece per year.
Day works mostly in what she describes as large hand-built narrative ceramic vessels and framed tile friezes as well as large-scale architectural mosaics, sculpting the vessels by building them up with coils layer by layer, drawing upon influences from her travels through Africa and the Middle East. A prime example of one of her narrative vessels is Leaving the Jungle. A large vase with the images of faces drawn out with a simple almost child-like airplane, with lines moving from the eyes of the faces to reinforce the subtle themes of searching, observation and connection. Set on a background of a yellow enriched by layers of a darkening that texturizes with patterns to produce different levels of depth, the images produce a lyricism of feeling that generates a curiosity to keep the viewer seduced and coming back.
Movement is a big aspect in her creative process as well. Swimming and walking allow her to find inspiration. The images she uses can come from dreams or analyzing the world around her. The images are then overlaid with text. The designs draw upon her understanding of the world and of art. The flatness of her figures on the vessels and in the mosaics betray a wisdom of beauty through time and technique. One can see this in a detail of a larger community-engaged mosaic titled In Our Midst where two faces face away from each other amid a myriad of square tiles put together with a logic disrupted by waves that break the plane in the lower left corner and rounded pieces from the top and sides pushing at what seem like rays coming from the figures. The overall effect is one of an almost placid revelation of discovery.
Day has said that her works investigate identity. She is fascinated by people and the arc that travels between people when they are looking at each other. A look that is perhaps consciousness seeing itself, and can be understood as what is singular to being human, like art-making itself, and as Day says, it is through this interest in identity that she is discovering who she is herself.
Branching away from the human form, she has figures of birds that, although they are animals, reflect through the personality of the sculptures the interiors of an emotional landscape and Day’s evolution of discovery. In the piece Edwina we see a medium sized purpleish-blueish bird with a long cylinder-like body sculpted out with wavy lines and feathers. It stands with its wings tucked in and head up, looking out at the world with what seems a silent inquisitiveness from the bustling collar of a feather-lined coat. A feral silence, in which the viewer can see their own questions emerge and their own answers for a world made into form manifest in a signature ceramic creature watching.
There are few artists creating similar work in Ontario, but being represented by Van Der Plas gallery in NYC helps keep her connected to the energy that births and develops her work. She is fortunate to be represented by the Michael Gibson gallery in London, Ontario and her work will be on display at the 2025 Outsider Art Fair in New York City.
With tiles, clay, glaze and an eye that can translate the truth of a desire and dream to the curved and bulbous surface of a layered vase, or a frieze, or in a mosaic, Susan Day forges a path through the wilderness of a signature beauty that the viewer is only too happy to follow. G&S
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