1. Could you give us a brief introduction of who you are and how you became an artist?
By day, I’m a freelance copyeditor and fact-checker for presses based in New York and New England, but I’m also an artist, who sells work in galleries in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. For example, some of my works are currently at GalleriE CHIZ in Shadyside.
I intended to be an artist since I was very little. In fact, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing. My Mom tried swimming, ballet, various music lessons, and theater, but the only thing I was ever genuinely and consistently interested in was creating things. My first works were pictures of stick-figure princesses drawn in ballpoint pen on tablets that Formica salesmen brought my father. When my father worked on cabinet orders in the shop on the weekends, I made flake-board, nail, and screw sculptures on the low worktables right beside him. I’ve taken some detours over the years, including writing some books of short stories, but I’ve always been making things. It’s truly my form of relaxation, even a kind of meditation.
2. What is the concept behind “The Escape Artist”? What experience/message is the show aiming to bring to the audience?
“The Escape Artist” started as a concept when I was teaching literature and composition at a local community college some years ago. I often taught Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which chronicles the mental unraveling of a woman following the birth of her first child—something we now recognize as post-partum depression. In order to provide a wider cultural context for the story, which was written in 1892, I would often bring in period advertisements, much like those in the framed collages that are part of the installation.
While the debate over the use of Photoshop in advertising currently rages, during Gilman’s time—when the feminist movement was in its incipient stages—Victorian ads featured drawings of women with impossibly small waists. Similar to Chinese foot-binding traditions, tight-lacing practices made many women incapable of moving around easily without the corset, and in order to wear it, one required help to put it on properly (something that some of the images in the installation collages also depict). Once the corset is tightened, breathing is restricted, since the lungs are compressed. This makes any significant activity, sometimes even sitting, difficult—hence the liberal use of the elongated “fainting couch” in the Victorian era, which allowed women to catch their breaths or slightly recline to somewhat relieve pressure. This, in many cases, imprisoned women in a way similar to the captivity of the central character in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” who was trapped by social expectation and personal circumstance. I’ve titled the work “The Escape Artist” because around the time women’s clothing and foundation garments were beginning to change, Houdini was at the apex of his popularity. In the same way he defied death (which the corset truly did precipitate in some women), womankind finally liberated themselves from the physical constrictions of the corset…but maybe not the emotional ones, as evidenced by our continued obsession with slender frames.
3. I understand that a lot of your work deals with the individual histories of women, particularly in the Victorian era. What inspires your work? Do you draw inspiration from/admire any other artists?
Oh yes, I love vintage photographs, especially Victorian cabinet cards, some of which appear on the cage crinoline of the central element in the installation. (This part is my tribute to, as Beyoncé would say, “all the…ladies,” or at least all the ladies who had to wear a corset!) I actually go antiquing and scavenging at flea markets just for these pictures. To me, these are windows on another time, fascinating social and psychological portraits. How these women carry themselves in the photos and the details of their clothing are fascinating to me. I began using these photos as a springboard for ink drawings, a series I called Women in Water—a metaphorical and literal reference to being in it up to your neck. Several of these have appeared in several literary journals, like Boxcar Poetry Review (http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/main_033.html) and Your Impossible Voice (http://www.yourimpossiblevoice.com/issue-3-spring-2014/). Fear not, gents, I’ve started a Men at Sea series, too.
In terms of influences, I studied art history—specifically, the era between 1898 and 1930—so I’m sure there are so many things that I’m not even aware of that are creeping into my works. My thesis, for example, was on the social satirist and Dadaist George Grosz. However, there are so many contemporary artists that amaze me. I keep regular tabs on the production of British illustrator Ruben Ireland, US artist Bret Pendlebury (who also uses vintage photographs for inspiration), and the truly amazing work of US illustrator Kelly Louise Judd (who goes by the artist name “Swanbones”).
4. Can you talk a little bit about your creative process?
I work art-making in whenever I have free time, and while I have a studio here at the house, I sometimes don’t get that far…I do a lot of work in the living room, so I can be near my husband in the evenings. More than once, I’ve been hand-dyed sewing lace onto a cabinet card or seed beads onto the corset (which appears in the installation) while we’re watching Gotham or Agents of Shield. I have completely taken over the coffee table, which is where I do a lot of my drawing and much of my fiber art and cabinet card work. As I write this, my coffee table has: a Tupperware container of sequins; a giant Ziploc bag of seed beads; four glass bottles of metallic ink; a bag of embroidery thread; embroidery thread snippets (all over the table cloth); and a coffee can with various pens, brushes, and implements, including a wire-cutters and a miniature hole punch. Often, I will start something, and even if I don’t care for it at first, I will continue to work with it, so I can turn it into something that has the ‘yum factor’ (because it sounds odd, this is not a phrase I usually ever say aloud)—what I mean is, the point at which the work becomes a delight to look at, and keep looking at, as the eye searches for detail. That’s when I know the piece is complete.
5. Are you working on any new projects at the moment? And where can we follow your work?
Right now, I am working on a series of drawings of the characters from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. So far, I’ve finished W.O. Gant and Ben, characters based on Wolfe’s father and older brother, respectively. (You can see them here: http://www.savannahschrollguz.com/menatseaseries.html ) My goal is to show all of them, when complete, at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Museum in Asheville, North Carolina, although the museum doesn’t know this aspiration yet. My website is located here: www.savannahschrollguz.com, and I often tweet about new projects, with pictures, on Twitter @ssguz. I only just started using Instagram, where my handle is: savannahschrollguz. More pics of my process will appear on Instagram soon.
6. Where do you see your work in 5 years?
In five years (if not a bit sooner), I hope to have entirely completed my Radium Girls graphic novel, titled The Color of Silence is Radium Green, which I started in 2013. I also have a series of vintage dresser’s mannequins from the turn of the twentieth-century that I have the seeds of an idea for, which will likely involve collaboration with my niece who is a fiber artist. So definitely within five years, I would like to bring the idea I have of melding language, fiber, light, and these mannequins to fruition. And, of course, I hope to show those Look Homeward, Angel portraits at the Wolfe Museum in North Carolina. Once they are all complete, I will work on seeing if I can make that happen.