JANUARY WINDOW ARTIST: SUSAN CLAUSEN
Susan Clausen installation in the Dirt Palace Storefront Window
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Susan Clausen has lived in Providence for 33 years. She received a BFA in light metals from the University of Illinois in 1980 and has continued to make artwork ever since, working in many mediums. Clausen attended Tyler School of art as a non-degree grad student and worked as a studio assistant for several glass artists over the years. She worked as a jewelry model maker for 16 years in the costume jewelry industry, as the teaching assistant in the carpentry shop the Rhode Island Juvenile Detention facility and as an artist in residence at Charles Fortes Elementary School. Clausen is one of the original founding members of AS220 in 1985 and is currently employed as one of the property managers for AS220.
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I feel best when I am engaged in making.
My artwork has typically involved things that move, works that invite interaction and play. Interactive sculptures, distorted skeleton puppets, trophy like bobble head animals and Stop Motion Animation to name a few.
I always loved making dioramas as a kid. When the opportunity came up to do the Dirt Palace window it seemed a perfect venue for a seven foot skeleton in a rocking chair. I created his environment using bobble heads and other thing I have made to furnish his home. His world comes to life every night from 5pm to 1am.
MONTHLY PICTORIAL TREAT FROM THE DUSTY SHELVES OF THE DIRT PALACE
FURTHERING THE QUEST TO SPREAD FUN
LIKE GIN AND JUICE, MOSTLY GIN
One good book that we have in our library is called
The Emotional Animal Within All of Us by Mark Baumer. It is from the time when Mark asked the internet for $50,000 to write 50 books in one year. He did not get the money but he wrote the 50 books anyway. Here is some writing that he did about the making of these 50 books in one year:
....people at the library heard about the fifty book project somehow and kept asking me if I had written the fiftybooks yet. I got tired of making excuses. It felt embarrassing. Around the beginning of June, I decided I would wake up early before work and write a book each day. After I decided this, I woke up the next morning and wrote a book. That night after work, I did the layout for the book and uploaded it on the internet. Then the next day I wrote another book and did the layout and uploaded that one on the internet. It’s pretty cool we live in a world where someone can literally publish a new book every single day. So yeah, I basically wrote a book every day or so. Sometimes I would feel myself trying to create something that would take years to finish before I would remember I didn’t have years to finish the thing I was trying to create.
Maybe someday we will have all 50 of the books in the Library here. The one about the Emotional Animals is pretty amazing, plus it is great to be reminded that you can wake up, write a book, go to work, come home lay out the book and do it all again 50 times in a year. Here's a sample of this highly informative book about emotional animals:
First thing to remember about emotional animals is that they have a large amount of brain tissue in their armpits. Second thing to remember is that the vivid taste of their existence cannot be swallowed. Third, and most important is that all emotional animals are basically yellow stationary clouds that have been consumed by the swirling blue dolphins that live somewhere beneath your retina and these dolphins can make you blind if you look at yourself the wrong way in a mirror.
