The fall Canvas event started with a bang thanks to an unexpected fire alarm just as members were arriving. Featured artist Susan Worsham saw the best in the situation. She says, “I was a little nervous before my first Canvas event. VMFA is special. It’s where my father used to take me to see art after church on Sundays. It’s home.” She adds, “When we all had to go outside, it gave me a moment to relax and as I stood with everyone, I was no longer scared.”
Dr. Sarah Kennel, the Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center, moderated an informal conversation with Susan about her artistic journey. Sarah says, “I was especially pleased to be able to feature an artist with a national reputation and yet strong local ties and stories, and I hope this sentiment was shared by our audience.”
Worsham’s work is featured in two exhibitions curated by Kennel and currently on view at the museum: A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 and Home/Grown: Photographs by Susan Worsham and Brian Palmer. Her images are both haunting and beautiful, giving viewers a sense of family, place, and the storied history of the south. “Photography is always some blend of fact and fiction, or of materiality and metaphor, of course, but Susan’s ability to weave together different poetic strands into an alluring whole is amazing,” Sarah says. “The photographs touch on life and death, using metaphors of the natural world and our human connection to ground the inevitable experiences of loss into something larger and broader.”
A special relationship with her friend and neighbor, Margaret Daniel, is at the core of Susan’s deep dive into photographic expression. She says, “Margaret is the oldest neighbor from my childhood street, and she was the last person to see my brother alive.” Susan’s older brother Russell took his own life after a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed. “Margaret made Russell her homemade bread, his favorite, buttered a slice, and took it up to him. Then she and my mother went for a walk down the lane and when they came back, he had shot himself. So, Margaret is a big part of my work. Her stories have become the seeds of my photographs as well as my healing. She started as a thread that has now become a blanket.”
Her photograph entitled Persimmon Grave is the only image Susan has ever named before she took the photo. She says, “Margaret used to take the children to the persimmon tree at the University of Richmond. She laughed as she told me Russell always had a ring of persimmon stained around his mouth. Through her story I went to find that tree. When I found it, there were these stone structures stacked up resembling graves. The fruit had fallen and collected on the surface in different stages of decay, some bluish black, others an orange red ripe color. I knew the title in my heart before I even looked through my camera. I often think of the first line in my brother’s suicide note, ‘I arrived home just about the time the honeysuckle blooms.’ Russell was in the 82nd airborne and not the type to notice flowers, but he knew it would be the last time he saw them.”
She adds, “I take that as a lesson and try to find beauty even where others might not see it. I fill my work with flowers and beautiful color almost as a remembrance of him.”
This curator and photographer enjoy a close working relationship. Sarah says, “Susan’s work is bold and subtle at once, and I am enamored of all the work by her we have on display. One of the more recent pictures shows Georgia—a young woman who has long modeled for Susan and is her kind of ‘stand in’ for the imaginative returns to the artist’s childhood—surrounded by a riotous bloom of hibiscus flowers. Susan captures Georgia on this delicate cusp that is adolescence: between child and adult, a bit wild, like the blooms that surround her, but also increasingly turning into a young woman—note the lipstick and the more guarded gaze. It’s a metaphorical picture about growing up, and it’s also an amazing portrait—a demonstration of the artist’s talent to coax so much beauty into one frame.”
Georgia with Hibiscus moscheutos (Rose Mallow) (detail), 2018, Susan Worsham (American, born 1969), inkjet print. Courtesy the artist and Candela Books + Gallery. ©️ Susan Worsham
Come and see A Long Arc: Photographs of the American South since 1845, on view through January 26, 2025, and Home/Grown: Photographs by Susan Worsham and Brian Palmer, on view through April 26, 2025.