Fluffy bracelets photo/Shell Hensleigh.
©
R a d a r
T e s t i n g t h e
B o u n d a r i e s
o f B e a u t y
Susan Hoge made her name
creating beaded jewelry in gem-
stones and gold. At the height
of her success, she went back to
school for a “radical change.”
Now 4
6,
she has gone in a pro-
vocative new direction—bead-
work that’s beautiful but not
pretty, such as her Chordata
___series, 2007-2008 ©.
“I wanted to shake myself
up, make something different,”
she says of her decision to enroll
at Cranbrook Academy of Art,
not far from her Michigan home.
The detour wasn’t really out of
character for Hoge, a free spirit
at heart. Though she’s a disci-
plined master of her craft, me-
ticulous about materials, she
feels her best designs come
when she lets her unconscious
guide her hands. “I don’t like to
know what I’m going to end up
with, because then it’s labor. It
keeps me surprised to not know
how it’s going to turn out.”
Her life, too, has followed
a meandering path. Hoge grew
up playing the flute and leaned
toward music until, as a student
at the University of Michigan,
she took ceramics and fell in
love with handwork. After
graduating she followed the
Grateful Dead for a while,
stringing beads at concerts. She
honed her skills restoring tribal
pieces at a beadwork gallery in
Michigan, then moved to New
Mexico, where she made sam-
ples in an “Indian jewelry” fac-
tory. Switching course again,
she headed to New York to
study at the Fashion Institute
of Technology, and her career
took off. By the early' 2000s
Hoge was making sensuous,
highly wearable jewelry that
turned up in
Vogue,
including
her Fluffy bracelets©. She de-
signed for Fred Leighton, did
high-end fairs, and was repre-
sented by galleries around the
country. After a few years of
that whirl, she felt burnt out.
“I said, is this what I want to
do with my life? I had to slow
down, stop.”
Cranbrook was the creative
tonic Hoge needed. There she
experimented with sculpting in
chocolate, hair and blown sugar.
She then returned to beadwork,
making a series of small, sculp-
tures of lustrous seed pearls
over a skeleton of “banal ob-
jects” (twigs, foam, silicone).
Skin and bones, mystery and
illusion are themes of these
pieces, which are anatomically
suggestive and meant to unset-
tle. Sometimes Hoge ups the
squirm factor by displaying
them with surgical instruments.
“What she did was really
test the boundaries of what
beauty' was for her,” observes
the German-born artist Iris
Eichenberg, head of metals at
Cranbrook. “Where does beauty
and seduction end and repulsion
begin? Where is that fine, fine
balance? She tested that line by
making work that had a strong
erotic sense, but that was also
very repulsive.” Using the clas-
sic language of a string of pearls,
Hoge’s objects politely under-
mine our associations of purity
and propriety. “They are or-
ganic forms that seem familiar,
but are slightly off,” says
Eichenberg. “Beauty' always has
a presence of something which
might be nasty or scary, and she
succeeded in finding a recipe
to combine those things.”
But fans of Hoge’s old-
school-beautiful jewelry' needn't
despair. Content with having
pushed the limits, “I still want
to continue doing my wearable
work,” she says, “to take fine
materials and make something
interesting out of them.” —
j .l .
susanhoge.com
H o t Spots
S t a n d o u t s
Gallery shows, listed A -Z by
state. View complete calendar:
americancraftmag.org
C A / Pasadena
Pasadena Museum
of California Art
Edith Heath: Tabletop Modernist
to Sept. 30
pmcaonline.org
Heath Ceramics, started in
1944, helped define mid-century'
modernism.
C A / Sacramento
Crocker Art Museum
Soaring Voices: Contemporary
Japanese Women Ceramic Artists
Aug. 8-Oct. 18
crockerartmuseum.org
Works by 25 pioneering fe-
males who made their mark
upon Japan’s once male-only
field of ceramics.
CO / Fort Collins
Lincoln Center Galleries
2 8th Annual Fabric o f Legacies
A rt Q uilt Exhibition
to Aug. 28
lctix.com
Stitched scenes may lift
viewers’ spirits to a Rocky
Mountain high.
aug/sepc>9 american craft oi
