Exploring Pain and Pleasure with Artist Heather Sutherland (H$)
Heather Sutherland, aka H$ is a glass artist whose work combines glass and various materials to depict concepts of gender, commodity, luxury, and labor. Listen to the interview and read the transcript here
As a child, Heather Sutherland (A.K.A. H$) had three things on her mind: she wanted to be a geologist, she wanted to be a hairdresser, and she wanted to be an artist. Now, as a glass artist with an ever-revolving hair color working in a medium that is truly of the earth (glass is made with sand, soda, and limestone) she pretty much nailed it on the head. Sutherland’s path through school wasn’t easy and she faced struggles with her dyslexia, but despite her setbacks, she went on to study glass in the graduate program at the University of Wisconsin Madison and has been recognized for her work by notable glass organizations including New Glass Review, Chrysler Museum Glass Studio, Wheaton Arts, and Pilchuck Glass School to name a few.
As an incredibly demanding and rewarding medium, the pursuit of glass gave Sutherland a sense of direction and a series of life lessons and forced her to learn to be in the moment. Glass won’t let you forget the repercussions of not paying attention, if you’re moving too slow, the reminder is “very actively and visually there right on the end of that blow pipe,” she says. Molten glass comes out of its furnace at 2150 degrees and glassblowers are constantly working to control and maintain as much heat in the glass as possible. Molten glass behaves like honey on a stick and while shaping and creating their object the artist must to constantly be rotating the blowpipe in order to keep it centered, some describe it as wheel throwing pottery on its side.
“Glass gave me this meditation that I wasn't able to have anywhere else. It forces you to live in the present… it gives you the opportunity to kind of block everything else out.”
“Savage Beauty” performance at Chrysler Museum Glass Studio
Her obsession with glass grew when she started to see it as more than just the object, but the product of process. As a self-identified ‘process junkie,’ Sutherland explains “it's more for myself and for my mental health a lot of times, than it is for the end of the process.” She finds herself often feeling “lackluster and sad when the object is done because that process is over,” but touts that as the reason why she stems into performative artwork, and she chases work that is “more based on the activation in the process versus the objects.” Her works take many forms, from large scale art objects to performance work, and is impressive at all scales. One of her first performances was a demonstration piece at the Chrysler Museum of Glass during an event which was a celebration of the first glass conference by Harvey Littleton. “[This performance] was especially important to me because it was the first time, at least in American glass history, that a woman was included in the making process of glass... to me that was a big point in time. It felt like the beginning of how women were being involved. And so my performance was on the day of that conference.” At the time she felt she and the other women in the hot shop were pressured to hide their femininity in favor of being more aggressive and performing more masculine because they needed to in order to be ‘professional.’
Her performance that day was a clapback against that, “I was like, dude, I can do everything you and I can do it in a dress and heels. So that's basically what me and a group of women did. We made this object (a glass stiletto), we wore, to their comfort, heels. I wore some kitten stiletto heels and everyone else had their variety of what heels meant to them. And everybody had either black or red dress and makeup on. And we nailed it, it was so freaking cool. And to me it was like this little poke, ‘I can do whatever you do, but I'm going to do it in a dress and heels and I'm still going to be a badass while I do it. It doesn't mean I have to hide that identity to me.’ And I felt like that performance was very stimulating to me and my artistic practice. That was at the very beginning of it.”
The power of the performances for Heather was not just in how they were observed by the audience, but how they carved themselves out as moments for her to deal with her own ideas and internal conflicts and feelings.
One of Sutherland’s most notable performances involved physically punching molten glass. Glass comes out of the furnace at 2150 degrees, and started smacking it around at about 2000 degrees. Trying to get it just right, she practiced the performance seven times before her performance in front of an intimate audience during her graduate program. As the survivor of sexual abuse as a child, she carried the mental burden with her for years and didn’t tell her mother until her early twenties. She expressed how the piece provided a sense of catharsis, she says “I didn't actually have a physical conversation, but I had a 'physical conversation' with the glass. And through that whole situation,
“I had been thinking about pain because I'm always able to digest physical pain really easily. But emotional pain for me is always something that just sticks around and festers inside of me.
The thing about it is physical pain has a beginning and an end… When you have an open wound, you have a week or two, the wound heals and then it's pretty much over. And the emotional [pain] was never easy because there's no foreseeable end. There's no physicality of it saying, 'I'm going to be healed in this amount of time.'”
She wanted to see if this medium that has done so much for her would help her digest the emotion. Her therapist had suggested she wrote the name of her abuser on the bottom of her shoe and go for a run and she would feel more powerful because she’d be stepping on him. She took that a step further with her glass performance. “The first few pieces were just me getting acquainted with the physicality of the punching and everything. Slowly, we started to add more and more gathers, so more and more glass to the piece to make it larger and larger.” The name of her abuser was written on a piece of paper and picked up and covered in glass.
Despite having gone through the process six times before and thinking she was ready, when the last gather of glass came out of the emotion, all of the emotion came streaming out of her body as she started punching the molten glass. She assured me, “I don't know how to throw a punch. I'm not a physical fighter. So for me, punching ended up being more of where I hurt myself in the actual pain of the burn. Afterwards. I was going through so much. I was crying [but] it allowed me to release this energy inside of me that had been pent up inside of there. To feel the pain physically versus holding it in emotionally really released a lot of that shit that was inside my fucking body and just festering inside.” Prior to this performance she hadn’t fully felt comfortable talking about the piece, but once she made it, she felt cracked open. “I no longer felt shame about it. I still can relive the moments, but I'm no longer imprisoned by it anymore. And because I can speak out about it. I feel so much better. Personally, I don't think everybody needs to go through this or everybody would feel the same way. But for me that's what activated this feeling inside of me, this comfortability with what happened in my past. So it was probably my favorite piece I ever did. Not necessarily for the photo or the artwork, but definitely for my mental health.”
Although she still enjoys performance pieces and the emotional raw aspect is still a guiding power in her work, her focus right now is work to be shown in a gallery, and her works take more tangible form. Many of her current works include large scale art objects in the form of glass acrylic nails, dildos, and lipsticks and jokes about trying to max it out as big as possible, and compares sharing their size to fish catching stories. The process of making these items of luxury are just as important to their meaning as their existence, she explains,
“I thought it was interesting as well like the process of how I was making it wasn't intuitive to wearing makeup. I'm sweating, I'm getting burned, my clothes are tattered, I'm getting smoke in the face. Yet here I am making this stereotypical object of luxury.”
Much of Sutherland’s work explores sexuality, from the allusion of lipsticks shaped like bullet vibrators, or the literal depiction of an oversized rabbit vibrator filled with glitter and her work is often displayed on faux fur or satin. One of her largest installation pieces, The Revolution of Self Exploration is a large scale anatomically correct 3D model of the clitoris covered in mirror that hangs as a disco ball. Sutherland claims she was “like 35” when she finally figured out what the clit was, “And guess what? It looks exactly like a fucking penis. It's an innie and they're an outtie.” Through self exploration and the purchase of her first vibrator, she learned of her own ability to make herself orgasm. Armed with this knowledge, she wanted to create a piece that idolized the clitoris in its entirety, featuring the internal structure she was never taught about in school, saying
“Let's not hide it anymore, let's celebrate it, let's make it into disco ball and celebrate the underneath of it. How awesome is this? It's just a sensory of pleasure. Like this is just for pleasure. I think that's awesome.”
Sutherland’s work makes no hesitation to be fully in your face, shining and sparkling in the light, and aggressively urging the viewer to reconsider their own preconceived notions and expectations of what femininity entails, just like she does.
The Revolution of Self Exploration
