When New Haven-based sculptor Susan Clinard moved from her longtime digs at the barn at the Eli Whitney Museum to a studio in West Haven earlier this year, she brought along with her hundreds of people — sculptures of people, to be precise, made of wood, clay, wire, and found objects.
“I’m always looking for materials to speak about the many things I want to speak about, but above all our common experience,” she said at a recent, well-attended open studio at her new space in the Gilbert Street Studios.
Among those that accompanied her on Sunday: a larger-than-life-sized figure clad in a coat of vibrantly colored ribbons. Look more closely and there are words on each ribbon. I wish to always be a good mother, one reads. I wish there were no more guns on the streets of New Haven. I wish my family accepts me for who I am. I hope I get a kitten.
“Outside of my Eli Whitney studio, there were two apple trees, and for about five months [in 2022], over 600 people hung ribbons expressing their wishes and longings,” Clinard said, amid the strains of jazz guitar from her son Olivier in the mellow light of the high-ceilinged space. “When you layer them together, they begin to echo each other. They evoke a shared sense of belonging.”
While she plans to open her space formally for City-Wide Open Studios in October, the purpose of the weekend event was, she said, “to welcome anyone just to walk through and say hello. A lot of people know I moved. They’ve seen images of the new space. Plus I’m finally beginning to feel settled.”
The commute, westward along Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, is longer than the short hop Clinard previously had from her home to the Eli Whitney Museum. Clinard doesn’t mind. “You’re seeing a whole swath of humanity as you’re driving in,” she said. “People are struggling, doing their thing. There’s a little bit of everything, and it all informs my work.”
It’s all part of “our shared human narrative,” she said — one that, as she puts it on her website, “tells stories, helps us connect and speak about our shared fears, beauty, and struggles.”
There’s a re-imagining of Odessa who, Clinard writes, “had a hard life, but probably the worst injustice that happened to her was that her body was illegally removed from her burial plot by greedy cemetery owners to gain profit from reusing her plot.”
And then there is her newest work, a series of charcoal portraits.
“I’m gearing myself to work very large in my next series of pieces,” she said, stopping at a study of a woman, face cast downward, clothed in a grid-patterned material.
“This one I love so much. I sewed in these threads to her body because I feel like all of these are parts of her story, things she’s let go and things she’s sewn into her being.”
With that, Clinard paused, taking in the figures, both human and handmade, peopling her studio. “I do feel moved in, and it feels good. Just incredibly grateful for the poetry that can come out of this new space.”