Susan Danis says yes to the universe. It started with painted mud skulls, then it was a 7-foot-long horse costume complete with a hot pink tail. Things have only gotten wilder since then.
“If I feel the desire very strongly to make something, no matter how preposterous it is, I will do it,” declares the 51-year-old Berkeley, Calif., artist. “Because the ideas are from the collective unconscious, and why would I censor that?”
A pack rat since she’s had pockets, Danis collects dried worms, gloves, and old socks. She lists the scrap yard across the bay in Petaluma as a favorite place: “It’s the only thing I’ve found that’s really as beautiful and compelling and visually interesting as a Parisian cemetery.”
And she’s tapped the community to satisfy her cravings. “These oral surgeons are giving me the teeth of the people of Berkeley in return for Jack Daniel’s and chocolates,” she explains.
“When I was making my giant hairball, I went to Supercuts for six months every day to collect the floor sweepings; I had my own bucket there,” she adds.
Danis also spent 16 hours at a time amassing objects during the city’s now-discontinued annual large trash day, including many that found their way into Bed.
Starting with an old French frame, she laid down a mattress wrapped in a pee-stained, thrift-store sheet. Then, with heavy fishing line, she tied shoes, ice skates, and galoshes to a quilt covered in velvet and added horns, a human skull, and a hairy Pata-gonian armadillo. She wove a loose pillowcase from shoelaces found on the street and stuffed it with stingray teeth, dentures, horse jaws, a raccoon skull, a centipede, and the bill of a swordfish.
“I try to embrace the universe as it is,” explains Danis. “It tends to offer the lobster combo plate, so that’s reflected in my work; I also offer the lobster combo plate.”
—Eric Smillie
>>For extra servings: susandanis.com
Photograph by Lee Fatheree
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