From Spain to California, from New York to Iowa and many places in between, Susan Chrysler White is an artist who has been around the world taking in the human experience. In her work, she encapsulates ideas and emotions of humanity and beyond, pulling together abstract elements of creatures, plants, emotions, galaxies and much more.
Now, the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering is lucky to welcome one of her iconic pieces to the Sukup Atrium: Capella, a bold yet detailed, confident yet delicate, starburst-like design.
An earlier version of Capella immediately captured the eye of Lynette Pohlman, Director and Chief Curator of Iowa State University Museums, at one of White’s art shows hosted by University Museums. After a few years of White showing Capella in different exhibitions, Pohlman contacted White and purchased the art piece, recently placed in the Sukup Atrium.
“I made this piece a number of years ago,” White said. “But every time I have presented it, I reconfigure it a little differently. I redesigned this one now with ellipses down the center, sort of like a backbone for the piece. Capella has a play of color with blues, yellows, oranges and greens to get this incredible color wheel going on, with a celebratory quality to it.”
White has always been an artist. She grew up in Spain, and intrigued by the concept of transparency, glass and layers, she was inspired by the work of Gaudi, an architect with intricate structures throughout Barcelona.
Before White began creating large sculptural pieces, she created many intricate, beautiful and bold paintings, often with sculptural elements with a hint of the unknown woven in.
“I’ve always had sculptural elements in my paintings, all my life,” White said. “I knew I wanted to make sculptures, and I wanted them to hang strangely, having a little bit of a creature quality, a botanical, otherworldly quality.”
Capella, the sculpture now hanging in Sukup, represents these many characteristics of White’s work. White says that she wanted her art to represent interior experiences, and its connections with ideas and emotional states. While many of her pieces are celebratory and bold, White also ties darker, emotional and philosophical sources into her creations.
“How can I best describe, in abstract language, the loss of a loved person’s mind and of all the memories that build a connected life and chart its denouement as it becomes incoherent? How do you show the simultaneity of events, experiences of an unstable environment, an unstable relationship, and deep-felt emotional responses in symbolic form? These are ideas that I am grappling with as my work has moved into more poignantly personal terrain,” White said on her website. “This sculpture has a starburst element, it almost feels like a cactus with spines, yet it also feels like paint performing in a way.”
White has created several sculptures here on campus. There is a piece similar to Capella, named Zoopsia, in the permanent collection of University Museums, another outside of the Hub, Coalesce, and a mural in the dining hall.