The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
“To know whether you are an artist or not is like breathing. You don’t question breathing. You have to breathe otherwise you just die. So you breathe.”¹ This quotation by the conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović, while seemingly hyperbolic, is also a caution to anyone contemplating a career in the arts. As Abramović says, the commitment is visceral and 24/7. You are compelled by an all-encompassing existential force to make work, regardless of the medium.
Terry Allen, musician and visual artist, describes another component of making: “One of the things that I think is important if you are an artist is that you go to your studio every day whether something happens or not.”² He was referring to the career of Pat Oliphant, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, who drew and submitted a cartoon for publication five times a week for 60 years. In addition, Oliphant was a painter, sculptor, and lithographer. He stopped only when losing his eyesight affected his craving to make art.
Abramović’s and Oliphant’s compulsion to breathe creativity is shown to be anathema to being motivated by fame or riches: it is the breathing that leads to recognition. And the same commitment is the essence of many makers devoted to craft practice.
Susan Collett knew, from the time she was a child, that she was called to make art; she was fortunate to be born into a home that facilitated that urge. Now, in her 60s, Collett still goes to her studio daily and was selected to exhibit a vessel at the Homo Faber Biennial in Venice in 2026. Her drawing, printmaking, and ceramics are testaments to the ceaselessness of being an artist.
Paper to Clay Loop
Collett’s studio in downtown Toronto, Canada, is two large light-filled rooms in a former warehouse. A visitor is welcomed by the aroma of coffee and pots of flowering geraniums that crowd the window sills. One room is devoted to ceramics with long tables, shelves of finished objects and glazes, an electric kiln, and works in progress. The other contains a printing press, desk, staging area, and archive of past projects. The space is warm in winter, and the landlord installed air conditioning last year, making it cool in the warmer months; the commute from Collett’s home is minutes when traffic is minimal. As a place one is ‘forced’ to go, the environment doesn’t get much better.
The ceramics and the printing are not separate enterprises: each feeds the other. Collett says, “From working with clay, the blind-embossing technique inspired a sculptural approach to printmaking, with three-dimensional relief branch work and veining.”³ She considers the veins or lines that occur—both in the washi paper prints and ceramic objects—as life lines. “My husband is asthmatic. The compositions look like lungs. Like breathing. Everything is connected. The life line, the veining, and the roots.”
Chronologically, the printing came first in Collett’s biography. As a teenager, she attended Central Technical School in Toronto where she learned printmaking from Ed Bartram, a respected printmaker and painter. She took classes in photography, life drawing, and painting. Although Central Tech had a dicey reputation, largely because its attendees were unorthodox, it gave her a solid training that warranted advanced standing when she enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, for graphic design and book illustration. This choice, at the commercial end of art making, appeased her parents and got her foot in the door of a dedicated art environment.
In Cleveland, Collett was blessed with insightful teachers who unwittingly facilitated the segue into clay. Collett recalls: “In my first illustration project I put prints into the layout and the teacher said, ‘Why don’t you go and major in printmaking. You can always fine-tune later. Go wide and you can narrow in later.’ So, I switched my major to printmaking. And from printmaking, the clay people saw my prints and said, ‘You’d love to carve clay. You’re doing all those woodcuts. Why don’t you come and carve some clay?’” Collett adopted ceramics in her third year, and her graduation exhibition in 1986 was a combination of printmaking and ceramics for which she was awarded the Agnes Gund Prize.
Returning to the line theme, Gust is an example in clay. It is constructed, beginning at the bottom. Once a strong base is established, the piece is upended and lines start to extend around the base. The lines are literal since Nichrome wire, a resistance wire used in heating elements, is wrapped in porcelain paper clay.⁴ Tendrils are added in an ad hoc manner, forming a coral-like body that goes into the kiln once or twice to ensure the solidity of the sculpture. Then more clay lines are added. At a certain point, the tendrils morph into flowers while glaze adds color and sheen, or not, depending on how Collett feels about the piece.
Gust is monotone with entangled ribbons of porcelain projecting from the base. This addition emphasizes the notion of lines. Even though the artist wishes to reference wind, I am reminded of the striations on giant clam shells that build up over decades. The sculptures are about time and the accumulation of stories, experiences, and emotions that accrete during a life, as well as the buffeting that circumstances require us to endure.
Making It
Immediately upon obtaining her BFA in 1986, Collett returned to Toronto and established a studio. She had day jobs at the Sandra Ainsley Gallery, a fledgling enterprise at the time, and the George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, which was also relatively new, having opened in 1984. The former gave her experience in packing and shipping and, later, exhibiting her work. In the evenings she built her ceramics practice and went full-time in 1993. Reflecting on her thirty-three years, Collett considers the seeming advantages that younger practitioners enjoy with the advent of social media: “There are so many great ways to reach out. But the downside is, it doesn’t really matter because this [the studio] is where you have to be. I even feel guilty sometimes if I’m sitting and drawing. I think I should be working harder. But it all counts as long as you’re here. Social media cannot help you with that singular thing. It takes time, and we don’t really value that. Actually, it comes down to that still.”
Commitment to making meant taking on a range of projects. Collett made one-of-a-kind accessories for high-end furniture stores and décor departments; for Mosaicwares she made components for mosaic objects that went to Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. She says, “For the first tile job, I proposed doing it with a rolling pin and then took the money from that job and bought a slab roller. It was a tool to go forward. I took ceramics really seriously. I’m glad I worked so hard then.” Concurrently, her studio work gained a reputation, and she won a number of awards at venues where she exhibited. In 2001, she received the inaugural Winifred Shantz Award from the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery and used the money to go to Jingdezhen, China, furthering her ceramics knowledge. A second trip to China occurred through an invitation to ceramic artists from each of Canada’s ten provinces to represent the country and exhibit in Fuping. Collett has also been invited to Israel, Scotland, and France, to give presentations about her work with paper clay, and to collaborate with local artists. Travel represents time away from the studio, yet the experiences have facilitated networking that doesn’t occur when immersed in creation.
Drawing is a constant for Collett. She doesn’t draw in anticipation of making: the ceramics happen by intuition and process. Instead, she carries a notebook wherever she goes and draws what she sees. From her China trips come ink drawings and watercolor sketches; during one week-long visit to Montreal, she created a different sketch of the same view from her hotel window each morning. This practice was inaugurated by her father when she was a child. James Collett was the owner of a commercial printing and office supplies company and a Saturday artist. He took Susan on plein air outings to draw natural environments in Toronto and on Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. He recognized her talent and bought her art to give to business clients. This support consolidated Susan’s vision of becoming an artist. In addition, because of James’s professional standards, he prompted his daughter on how to present her work—wrapped in tissue? in a gift box? with an invoice? From the beginning, art wasn’t just a hobby.
Home Sweet Home
It would be fair to say that as much as Collett is driven by the need to make art, she absorbed her father’s drive as a businessman. “I worked in my Dad’s printing offices on layouts and graphic-designed business cards. It was familiar to me but not exciting.” This statement explains the branching out into the unfamiliar territory of printmaking and ceramics, yet demonstrates the exposure to the practicalities of making a living. At one stage she designed and made ceramic fireplace surrounds with stylized 3-D foliage motifs superimposed on an architectural form. She enjoyed the projects and took advantage of designers and their clients visiting the studio. Being permitted to enter the artist’s sanctum often fosters further connection. “They’d say, ‘I didn’t know you made vessels, I thought you just were a tile maker.’ So they’d buy a print to go over the fireplace. I’ve always multi-tasked. I haven’t sat and waited for one thing to happen.”
A relatively recent series, entitled Beacon, uses ribbons of frost porcelain. “It’s glorified coil building. I’ve hammered out the coils. I create ribbons of porcelain first, keep them under plastic, and build. I get a flow and keep it moving.” A base is formed over a newspaper ball and layers accumulate by happenstance. There is a long process of drying in between additions, with at least three firings as well. The inevitable collapsing and cracking are accepted: “It’s not a perfect thing, it’s not a perfect vase.” The collapse is a metaphor for a world that seems to be falling apart, yet perseverance is also present. Once the vessel is deemed complete, an oyster shell glaze is sprayed on the inside. The translucence of the porcelain with the reflections from the glaze’s sheen combine in a sculpture that is susceptible to light.
Collett works on more than one piece at a time. She starts one, “then as I change my idea, I start another one. That keeps the momentum going. It helps me to keep a flow of ideas.” One of the ways that Collett keeps the ideas flowing is by teaching a class on Tuesday mornings in her studio. “My group is seven women who have been coming for ten years. At the beginning I gave projects; it was very structured, and by the end each person had a body of work and tried different techniques. Now it’s independent study. It’s evolved over the years, and you wouldn’t believe the connections that have been made amongst these women.”
The friendships, the sculptures, the embossing of Japanese washi paper and more—all are contained in premises on a street appropriately named Niagara, where the flow never stops. Each evening as Susan Collett leaves her studio, she turns around, faces it and anticipates what she will do tomorrow. Like for Marina Abramović, the breathing of art will continue in the coming days.
the author D Wood has a PhD in design studies and is an independent craft scholar whose artist profiles and exhibition reviews have appeared in an international roster of art and design publications. She is the editor of and contributor to Craft is Political (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The Politics of Global Craft (Bloomsbury, 2025).
1 Quoted in Lydia R. Figes, Survival Notes: Life Lessons from Contemporary Artists, London: Thames & Hudson, 2025, p. 19. 2 A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant (2025), Dir. Bill Banowsky, USA: Railyard Films LLC. 3 Quotations from Susan Collett are from an interview with the author, 26 February 2026, and ‘Susan Collett’ in Where Women Create, Iss. 30 (Spring 2025), p. 9-21. 4 A video on Collett’s website demonstrates the process. https://susancollett.com/video.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
“To know whether you are an artist or not is like breathing. You don’t question breathing. You have to breathe otherwise you just die. So you breathe.”¹ This quotation by the conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović, while seemingly hyperbolic, is also a caution to anyone contemplating a career in the arts. As Abramović says, the commitment is visceral and 24/7. You are compelled by an all-encompassing existential force to make work, regardless of the medium.
Terry Allen, musician and visual artist, describes another component of making: “One of the things that I think is important if you are an artist is that you go to your studio every day whether something happens or not.”² He was referring to the career of Pat Oliphant, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, who drew and submitted a cartoon for publication five times a week for 60 years. In addition, Oliphant was a painter, sculptor, and lithographer. He stopped only when losing his eyesight affected his craving to make art.
Abramović’s and Oliphant’s compulsion to breathe creativity is shown to be anathema to being motivated by fame or riches: it is the breathing that leads to recognition. And the same commitment is the essence of many makers devoted to craft practice.
Susan Collett knew, from the time she was a child, that she was called to make art; she was fortunate to be born into a home that facilitated that urge. Now, in her 60s, Collett still goes to her studio daily and was selected to exhibit a vessel at the Homo Faber Biennial in Venice in 2026. Her drawing, printmaking, and ceramics are testaments to the ceaselessness of being an artist.
Paper to Clay Loop
Collett’s studio in downtown Toronto, Canada, is two large light-filled rooms in a former warehouse. A visitor is welcomed by the aroma of coffee and pots of flowering geraniums that crowd the window sills. One room is devoted to ceramics with long tables, shelves of finished objects and glazes, an electric kiln, and works in progress. The other contains a printing press, desk, staging area, and archive of past projects. The space is warm in winter, and the landlord installed air conditioning last year, making it cool in the warmer months; the commute from Collett’s home is minutes when traffic is minimal. As a place one is ‘forced’ to go, the environment doesn’t get much better.
The ceramics and the printing are not separate enterprises: each feeds the other. Collett says, “From working with clay, the blind-embossing technique inspired a sculptural approach to printmaking, with three-dimensional relief branch work and veining.”³ She considers the veins or lines that occur—both in the washi paper prints and ceramic objects—as life lines. “My husband is asthmatic. The compositions look like lungs. Like breathing. Everything is connected. The life line, the veining, and the roots.”
Chronologically, the printing came first in Collett’s biography. As a teenager, she attended Central Technical School in Toronto where she learned printmaking from Ed Bartram, a respected printmaker and painter. She took classes in photography, life drawing, and painting. Although Central Tech had a dicey reputation, largely because its attendees were unorthodox, it gave her a solid training that warranted advanced standing when she enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, for graphic design and book illustration. This choice, at the commercial end of art making, appeased her parents and got her foot in the door of a dedicated art environment.
In Cleveland, Collett was blessed with insightful teachers who unwittingly facilitated the segue into clay. Collett recalls: “In my first illustration project I put prints into the layout and the teacher said, ‘Why don’t you go and major in printmaking. You can always fine-tune later. Go wide and you can narrow in later.’ So, I switched my major to printmaking. And from printmaking, the clay people saw my prints and said, ‘You’d love to carve clay. You’re doing all those woodcuts. Why don’t you come and carve some clay?’” Collett adopted ceramics in her third year, and her graduation exhibition in 1986 was a combination of printmaking and ceramics for which she was awarded the Agnes Gund Prize.
Returning to the line theme, Gust is an example in clay. It is constructed, beginning at the bottom. Once a strong base is established, the piece is upended and lines start to extend around the base. The lines are literal since Nichrome wire, a resistance wire used in heating elements, is wrapped in porcelain paper clay.⁴ Tendrils are added in an ad hoc manner, forming a coral-like body that goes into the kiln once or twice to ensure the solidity of the sculpture. Then more clay lines are added. At a certain point, the tendrils morph into flowers while glaze adds color and sheen, or not, depending on how Collett feels about the piece.
Gust is monotone with entangled ribbons of porcelain projecting from the base. This addition emphasizes the notion of lines. Even though the artist wishes to reference wind, I am reminded of the striations on giant clam shells that build up over decades. The sculptures are about time and the accumulation of stories, experiences, and emotions that accrete during a life, as well as the buffeting that circumstances require us to endure.
Making It
Immediately upon obtaining her BFA in 1986, Collett returned to Toronto and established a studio. She had day jobs at the Sandra Ainsley Gallery, a fledgling enterprise at the time, and the George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, which was also relatively new, having opened in 1984. The former gave her experience in packing and shipping and, later, exhibiting her work. In the evenings she built her ceramics practice and went full-time in 1993. Reflecting on her thirty-three years, Collett considers the seeming advantages that younger practitioners enjoy with the advent of social media: “There are so many great ways to reach out. But the downside is, it doesn’t really matter because this [the studio] is where you have to be. I even feel guilty sometimes if I’m sitting and drawing. I think I should be working harder. But it all counts as long as you’re here. Social media cannot help you with that singular thing. It takes time, and we don’t really value that. Actually, it comes down to that still.”
Commitment to making meant taking on a range of projects. Collett made one-of-a-kind accessories for high-end furniture stores and décor departments; for Mosaicwares she made components for mosaic objects that went to Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. She says, “For the first tile job, I proposed doing it with a rolling pin and then took the money from that job and bought a slab roller. It was a tool to go forward. I took ceramics really seriously. I’m glad I worked so hard then.” Concurrently, her studio work gained a reputation, and she won a number of awards at venues where she exhibited. In 2001, she received the inaugural Winifred Shantz Award from the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery and used the money to go to Jingdezhen, China, furthering her ceramics knowledge. A second trip to China occurred through an invitation to ceramic artists from each of Canada’s ten provinces to represent the country and exhibit in Fuping. Collett has also been invited to Israel, Scotland, and France, to give presentations about her work with paper clay, and to collaborate with local artists. Travel represents time away from the studio, yet the experiences have facilitated networking that doesn’t occur when immersed in creation.
Drawing is a constant for Collett. She doesn’t draw in anticipation of making: the ceramics happen by intuition and process. Instead, she carries a notebook wherever she goes and draws what she sees. From her China trips come ink drawings and watercolor sketches; during one week-long visit to Montreal, she created a different sketch of the same view from her hotel window each morning. This practice was inaugurated by her father when she was a child. James Collett was the owner of a commercial printing and office supplies company and a Saturday artist. He took Susan on plein air outings to draw natural environments in Toronto and on Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. He recognized her talent and bought her art to give to business clients. This support consolidated Susan’s vision of becoming an artist. In addition, because of James’s professional standards, he prompted his daughter on how to present her work—wrapped in tissue? in a gift box? with an invoice? From the beginning, art wasn’t just a hobby.
Home Sweet Home
It would be fair to say that as much as Collett is driven by the need to make art, she absorbed her father’s drive as a businessman. “I worked in my Dad’s printing offices on layouts and graphic-designed business cards. It was familiar to me but not exciting.” This statement explains the branching out into the unfamiliar territory of printmaking and ceramics, yet demonstrates the exposure to the practicalities of making a living. At one stage she designed and made ceramic fireplace surrounds with stylized 3-D foliage motifs superimposed on an architectural form. She enjoyed the projects and took advantage of designers and their clients visiting the studio. Being permitted to enter the artist’s sanctum often fosters further connection. “They’d say, ‘I didn’t know you made vessels, I thought you just were a tile maker.’ So they’d buy a print to go over the fireplace. I’ve always multi-tasked. I haven’t sat and waited for one thing to happen.”
A relatively recent series, entitled Beacon, uses ribbons of frost porcelain. “It’s glorified coil building. I’ve hammered out the coils. I create ribbons of porcelain first, keep them under plastic, and build. I get a flow and keep it moving.” A base is formed over a newspaper ball and layers accumulate by happenstance. There is a long process of drying in between additions, with at least three firings as well. The inevitable collapsing and cracking are accepted: “It’s not a perfect thing, it’s not a perfect vase.” The collapse is a metaphor for a world that seems to be falling apart, yet perseverance is also present. Once the vessel is deemed complete, an oyster shell glaze is sprayed on the inside. The translucence of the porcelain with the reflections from the glaze’s sheen combine in a sculpture that is susceptible to light.
Collett works on more than one piece at a time. She starts one, “then as I change my idea, I start another one. That keeps the momentum going. It helps me to keep a flow of ideas.” One of the ways that Collett keeps the ideas flowing is by teaching a class on Tuesday mornings in her studio. “My group is seven women who have been coming for ten years. At the beginning I gave projects; it was very structured, and by the end each person had a body of work and tried different techniques. Now it’s independent study. It’s evolved over the years, and you wouldn’t believe the connections that have been made amongst these women.”
The friendships, the sculptures, the embossing of Japanese washi paper and more—all are contained in premises on a street appropriately named Niagara, where the flow never stops. Each evening as Susan Collett leaves her studio, she turns around, faces it and anticipates what she will do tomorrow. Like for Marina Abramović, the breathing of art will continue in the coming days.
To learn more about Susan Collett and her work, visit susancollett.com or follow on Instagram @susan.collett.
the author D Wood has a PhD in design studies and is an independent craft scholar whose artist profiles and exhibition reviews have appeared in an international roster of art and design publications. She is the editor of and contributor to Craft is Political (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The Politics of Global Craft (Bloomsbury, 2025).
1 Quoted in Lydia R. Figes, Survival Notes: Life Lessons from Contemporary Artists, London: Thames & Hudson, 2025, p. 19.
2 A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant (2025), Dir. Bill Banowsky, USA: Railyard Films LLC.
3 Quotations from Susan Collett are from an interview with the author, 26 February 2026, and ‘Susan Collett’ in Where Women Create, Iss. 30 (Spring 2025), p. 9-21.
4 A video on Collett’s website demonstrates the process. https://susancollett.com/video.
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