Gone

Suzanne McLeod

Interview by L. Valena

Can you first just describe what you responded to?

I responded to a poem that was originally in Portuguese. It was titled How To Try Not To Kill Yourself. It was a short poem, I liked it a lot. It spoke about two sisters who experienced the bomb in Hiroshima, and six months later one of them had thrown herself in front of a train, and the other had lived to tell the story. The second part of the poem was about watching a celebrity be interviewed. She was having a baby, and bought all the right equipment and stuff, and was interviewed and asked what it was like to have a baby. Did she feel joyful? And she said, “No, I feel guilty. I've just released someone into suffering.” At some point in the poem, it talked about the courage to live, and the courage to die. And it closes with a line about ‘That's what convinces me to try not to kill myself.’

Initially, I found myself writing a lot. Just free writing. What I could relate to, questions that I have, just brainstorming. And I found myself coming up with images. Images about those two different types of courage- living and dying, and how they're two sides of the same coin. There's suffering in living, and there's suffering that provokes the choice to die.

And then I remembered that it wasn't my job to just illustrate this poem. The next person who sees my work is not going to know what prompted it, and they don't need to. It's its own piece. At that point I arrived at a turning point, and was kind of freed up. This poem has stirred the pot, I was thinking about different things, but now I got to start fresh, and decide what I was going to make in these two weeks. It was a really good two weeks for me. I just left a job I'd had for fifteen years yesterday. Yesterday was my last day on the job.

Oh my god! Congratulations!

It was a full-time mental health job. I'm still seeing individual patients, but I was working in a hospital program. I really loved it, but it felt like it was time to turn my sights more towards my studio and to open up my time for more… I don't know what. It's kind of like that “Exquisite Corpse” game. I've turned the page, and it's blank. What's next?

“All I have are these weird little markings for reference.”

Right! There's lots that's come before. Lots of artwork, lots of different projects, lots of different types of media. But it's really blank right now. So I was very excited about this project, because it felt like a little bit of structure for this time, a little bit of focus. It still left a blank page as far as how I wanted to respond. It could be anything.

And then a funny thing happened. I got married this summer, and I'm living with my husband, but I come back to my house where my studio and garden are. I came back to my studio one day, right after I got the poem, and I had left the hose on because we had such a drought going. Well, unfortunately, a lot of the water went into the basement. So I went into my studio, and there were two inches of water.

That happens. It prompted me to clean out a bunch of stuff, and the floor is super clean now. But one thing that happened was all these rolled-up paintings from the eighties and nineties soaked up a lot of water. So I had to unroll them. I hadn't looked at some of them in twenty or thirty years. So I rolled them all out to see if I wanted to save them. A whole lot of them I decided “Nope, time to go.” And there were others that I decided I wanted to save. But one of them was the one that I put on the window shade. That was from 1988. I hadn't seen it in 30 years. It was from a time when actually I had made a suicide attempt.

I remember doing that painting, that big life-sized self-portrait, and it was really about two different voices inside me. And then I rolled it up and put it away. But it came to life through this whole water/flooding incident. And I had already been thinking, in response to the poem, that I wanted to do something with wood. Somehow the idea of a window shade, which you can open and close, and something is there but then it's gone, and you can see through it. But I didn't know what. I thought maybe I would drill holes, or paint on it, or write on it. But I posted on the free list, and a women immediately answered that she had this beautiful wooden blind that she had been waiting to give to someone. So I got a free window blind. And then I saw the painting, and thought, perfect. I didn't want to just roll it up again and put it back in the corner. So I cut it into strips, and just thought, who cares? I'm playing with this. I'm just playing with some media and exploring, so it felt really fun.

That is so cool. So everything, including all of the writing on it, is from the original painting?

Yes. The original piece was a six foot tall painting. I looked at it. and thought that it would fit pretty well on the shade.

It is so beautiful to me that you had made this about your own suicide ideations, and were processing that in this way, so many years ago, and that you could relate that to this poem and these ideas. There's something kind of alchemical that's coming to mind about the way you put it on the window shade. It really transfigures it into something else. Very cool.

Yeah. The whole process felt kind of alchemical. A lot of serendipity, and coincidences that aren't really coincidences. I thought that the water coming in was just saying 'Look at this stuff.' It was a really interesting opportunity to look at work from thirty years ago, and realize what a different place I'm in. This is a time where I'm kind of accessing: Where am I? What's next? Where do I want to go? It was a really beautiful opportunity to reflect on that. And to realize what's different, and to experiment with putting something on a shade.

I love the subtext of being able to look through that experience, through it to the future and to the past.

And I remembered so much about what I was feeling when I was making it thirty years ago. I'm not sure if it's so legible on the shades. The red letters outside the figure were just repetitions of 'you could be so attractive, you should be so successful, you should be so happy, you should be so thankful, you should be so happy.' That's probably a refrain that a lot of people can relate to.

Oh my god, it really cuts to the core. Those voices are certainly present in my head. I'm sure they're present in a lot of people's heads.

I think they're present in lots of people’s heads. I think it takes a lot of time to realize that they're inherited, or cultural, but whatever they are, they're torments. They're not really acknowledging what you are and what you've already done. So the writing on the inside of the figure says "I like to make things, I just like to make things." That feels refreshing. It's true now, it was true thirty years ago, but what's different is those outside voices don't torment me now. I can put them on the shade and just make them disappear… see right through them. They used to be a pretty big wall… and loud.

I love the statement that ‘I like to make things’ is enough. We are creative beings. We are here to make things. We enjoy making things. And whatever we're making, it's enough that we're making it. We're in a really hard time right now; this is a time in which a lot of people are going through some pretty bad shit. Just making things can get us through.

I remember feeling that the truth is pretty simple. I just like to make things. Is that enough? But to trust that it's enough really does connect us, to ourselves and to each other, to inspiration and insight. I think it does help all those big things, but it's not through the worried mind, it's through the heart and our core.

I want to say one more thing, which is that I have over the years explored many different media. I hung the shade in the door of a tiny house that I built in my backyard.

You built that house?

I did. I took a class years ago in 'how to build a she shed', a women's carpentry course in Vermont. So then I came home and made this little… it's a hammock house really. It has a skylight, and windows, and a hammock inside. It's really nice. It's really simple. It's like a shed, but it's nice. But I was so amazed by how perfectly the window shade fit in the doorway. I hadn't planned that. And the colors. They all seemed to be kind of waiting for each other.

Call Number: Y36PP | Y39VA.mcGo

Suzanne McLeod builds, paints, draws, and sews all sorts of things in her Arlington MA studio.  She's inspired by daydreams, night dreams, and by her work as a psychotherapist.  Finding her best way - whatever the medium - to respond to the call of the moment at hand brings her great satisfaction, and then more wandering and learning.