Suzanne Larson loves to be around animals, whether they be made of flesh and blood and wrapped in shell or fur, or constructed from Styrofoam or papier-mâché and wrapped in thrift-store ties and living room drapes. Either way, animals speak to her.

As a veterinary technician, the flesh and blood kind were part of her professional life, and when she finally had the courage, as she puts it, to embrace her life as an artist, animals joined her. For the past decade, they have come to life under her caring hands in the whimsical found-art assemblages that have fueled her artistic endeavors.

Asha and Muroki by Suzanne Larson

Larson has been in love with animals since her childhood. She remembers the sensation she had as a little girl, standing next to the horses she loved to ride, and pressing her body against their strong forms. The feeling was intimate and spiritual. Larson grew up in New York in a family of artists. Her mother was a painter, her sister a talented musician, and her brother a writer and filmmaker. The youngest of the family, she had no desire to compete with the others. She focused her attentions on animals and ignored her artistic impulses well into adulthood, until another set of animals began calling to her.

New York, with its hustle and bustle, its frenetic energy, shrill noises and moving masses of human bodies, was overwhelming to Larson, and when she was a young adult she realized she had to leave. Her first stop was in Los Angeles, where she stayed with a friend; she soon discovered, however, that she had crossed an entire continent only to find herself in a horizontal version of the city she had left behind. It was the late seventies and her brother, Francois Camoin, had just landed a teaching position at the University of Utah, so she decided to join him in Salt Lake.

When she arrived in the Wasatch Mountains, Larson had an epiphany. She realized just how strong her need was for a connection with nature. Not unlike her connection with animals, she says. Utah, with its variety of landscapes and easy access to open spaces, seemed the perfect place. She spent the next seven years in Utah, before leaving for job opportunities in Memphis and then New York. But in the end, she returned to Salt Lake in 1991. “I’ve been a number of places around the country,” she says now, “and this is the best place I’ve known.” In Salt Lake she found her home, but she had yet to find her new life as an artist.

In the mid-nineties, Larson became dissatisfied with her life as a veterinary technician, the profession she had pursued first in New York and then in Utah. So she decided to go back to school. “Being the practical person I am, I went to community college for studying graphic design because you can make money at that,” she says. “And boy, once I got into that I said ‘Oh, this is what I’m supposed to be doing! It was an eye-opening thing . . . Even the stuff I couldn’t do I really enjoyed.”

Tigger at Carneval

For one of her classes, as a study in texture, Larson was told to buy a Mardi Gras mask and add material to it. When she was unable to find a mask at the local craft store, she decided to make her own. She bought a piece of Styrofoam and began carving into it. “I just kept carving that Styrofoam and [a] tiger started to emerge . . . I had an absolute ball.” The tiger, with incense cones for fangs and colors made out of spice, became “Tigger at Carneval” and Larson began her vocation of creating “wild animals engaged in human pursuits of happiness.”

During her time in school, Larson found herself in what she describes as “the process of getting unmarried” to her first husband. So, though she had a house and a studio to work in, now she needed to find employment. She quit school and found an office job. Her greatest solace during this period was Allister, a piano playing alligator who came to life as “Allister Taking Requests at the Blue Note.” “I was able to be happy to be [working on Allister] while the difficulties of being unmarried happened.”

Allister Taking Requests at the Blue Note.

Larson, with the help of the animal creations coming to life around her, was working her way out of one life and into the next. This next life as an artist was still gestating; the real birth would happen in 1998 when she saw a notice for the Hogle Zoo’s World of the Wildexhibit. “That’s when I was questioning [if I was an artist]. I was having a good time. I was even willing to think that I might be an artist because I really liked what I was producing.” John Gleason, a copper artist who now lives in Chandler Arizona and whom Larson refers to as her “artistic mentor,” encouraged her to fill out the Zoo’s entry form. He gave her words of wisdom that changed the course of her life. “If you can walk outside your front door with that piece of artwork and take public responsibility for that piece of artwork, you’ve won. That’s the prize.”

And so Larson submitted “Umfulozi at the Opera,” which was juried in to the show. Then, at the opening reception, as Larson was busy looking at the other entries, the “Best of Show” award was announced. Her new husband, Bob Larson, leaned over and said, “That’s you.” “My feet didn’t hit the ground for some time,” Larson says. “A jury of other artists, whose opinion I respected were willing to call it art to get it in this show; that’s when I really became willing to call myself an artist.”

Max and Algernon by Suzanne Larson

Larson recognizes that some people have a hard time placing her work in the world of fine art. “I’m all about whimsy,” she says, “and whimsy is a subset of the fine art world that gets pushed to the periphery.” “I do fictional reality,” she explains. “They look like the animal they are. They are animals. But maybe they’re a little smarter, a little more worldly.” She says they are very self aware. They look around them and say “that human animal is doing that and that looks like fun so I’ll do that.”

What they decide to do is up to the animals. “My part with the animals is choosing the colors and the textures and what goes next to what, as they tell me what they are . . . As soon as you put the eyes in the animal sculptures, they are alive. That is when there starts to be a dialogue between the animal and myself.”

That dialogue has created a whole menagerie of creatures, from Max and Algernon, professor and student mice studying the properties of cheese in their Winder dairy laboratory, to Sonja, the singing pig lathering up in her bathtub. Larson has exhibited every year at the Zoo show, and was invited to exhibit at the Face of Utah Sculpture III exhibit this summer. In 2004, she had the first and, so far, only chance to let all of her creatures play together at an exhibit at Patrick Moore Gallery.

Sonja Singing in the Tub by Suzanne Larson

Around the time of the Patrick Moore show, Larson began looking for an additional artistic medium. “The sculpture is very time intensive and it doesn’t go with anybody’s couch,” she explains. “I needed something I liked that I could make some money at.” She decided to take a class at Creative Glass in Sugar House. “When I took that glass class the possibilities were endless.”

Her instructor invited her to join the Glass Art Guild of Utah, an organization filled with what Larson says are “the most amazingly generous group of people I’ve ever met in terms of welcoming someone new, sharing information.” Which came in handy, because as Larson quickly learned, though glass might be easier to sell than sculpture it isn’t necessarily easier to make. “The science involved in this is way more than I thought. Firing schedules is everything. Even if you think you know it there are a variety of reasons for doing something.”

After over three years of refining them, her skills really came under the test this year when Charley Hafen invited her to show in his gallery. Hafen owns a jewelry store a few blocks from Larson’s home where he also displays artwork by local artists. He began by having a few pieces by all the artists hanging in the gallery, but has since decided on solo shows and invited Larson to be featured for the holiday show, which opened on December 1st.

On the eve of her show, Larson is busy in her basement studio. Her two kilns hum and click, as she struggles with cutting and weaving new pieces. Before the show at Charley Hafen came around, Larson had been splitting her time between the assemblages and the glass. For the past three months, however, she has concentrated solely on the glasswork. “Given the amount of science involved and the practice needed, I wasn’t learning things,” she says of her previous working schedule. “Since I’ve been working here everyday, the why of it has really begun to sink in.” Larson has learned that glass has its own challenges and its own rewards. She loves getting a new piece of art glass, pulling it out of the crate and admiring the color. She likes a lot less bandaging up her hands and arms as she cuts herself on the glass or finding a whole batch of glass overheated and destroyed. “I’m finding this to be much more challenging [than the assemblage work] and I don’t really say that in a positive way,” she confesses.

At various points the difficulties became so intense Larson thought of selling off her kilns and giving up. Recently, she was making ornaments when she had a revelation. “I realized ‘I am not having fun.'” The next day she decided to get back to work. “If I must be down here, I’m gonna have fun,” she told herself. She talked to friends and family for encouragement. She began approaching the glass more like her sculpture, looking for solutions, accepting that she could do this. “Since I had that revelation I’ve actually had some fun down here.”

Zariffa

Ironically, in selling her glass, Larson has also found a market for her sculpture. Leland Gray, a local architect with LPDJ architects, met Larson after seeing her glasswork. When she mentioned her assemblages he was intrigued; and after seeing Ziraffa, a huge giraffe Larson had made, Gray had a flash of insight. He had been commissioned to build the Faith Chapel Activities Center in Birmingham, Alabama. The children’s center would be based on Noah’s Ark. Would Larson consider doing a giraffe for the entrance. Why not two, Larson said. A mother and child.

Asha, Larson says, is a motherly giraffe that loves jewelry. Her body is currently stored at a neighbor’s, but her neck and head lie, forlorn, on a table in Larson’s studio. As she moves about the place, Larson can’t help but caress the giraffe’s neck. Her need to return to her animals is evident.

On another table lies a pile of old neck ties. They are destined for Muroki, the child giraffe, who told Larson he wanted zebra stripes instead of giraffe spots.

A stack of ties in Suzanne Larson’s studio

Now that the pressure of her opening at the gallery has passed, Larson has time to pause and consider. She’ll begin working on Asha and Muroki again. And there are still a number of things she would like to try in glass. She talks about using pieces of fused glass to return to her true subject: animals.

Most important is Larson’s need to have fun at what she is doing. “If I am not in my studio having fun the majority of the time, I really need to be doing something else . . . I’m extremely lucky. I’m so grateful that I get to be a full-time artist. I don’t want to take that lightly.”

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.