Born Again

Hannon is known for a series of sculptures of wings made from discarded antique Bibles. Her interest in this seemingly fragile medium has led her to Getty multiple times. She recently told us how Getty has supported her work with paper, and, in the process, she revealed the surprising, poignant meaning hidden in her sculptures.

Susan Hannon: My relationship with paper began with my father. He spent time in an orphanage and worked as a traveling salesman in Canada. Art was beyond his reach, but he was naturally gifted and drew faces on every spare paper scrap, including the backs of receipts. I loved art too. I was the kid who colored within the lines by age three. Dad always encouraged my artistic experiments with paper.

There was one paper experiment he didn’t help me with. I found his Playboy magazines and was stunned to discover not the pictures of unclothed women but that the centerfolds were three-page gatefolds. I cut the figures out and used them as gigantic paper dolls. I made them clothes by drawing on and cutting up typing paper, but it was awkward because their hands were in weird positions covering up various parts of their bodies. Mom told me not to take those paper dolls outside to play with. Dad laughed at my creativity. I had transformed these adult paper materials into something childlike.

Dad died when I was 14. I soon discovered that Mom had burned Dad’s paper sketches in a barrel—perhaps her way of trying to heal, reinvent, or resurrect our lives.

My artwork now explores paper through transformation, reinvention, and resurrection. I use very old family Bibles, some Civil War era, prayed and cried over at life’s milestones. Endpapers record dates of births, marriages, and deaths. I am currently working on a piece using the family Bible of my late friend, UCLA instructor Gray Adams, and it documents a beautiful story of his great-grandparents, who lost one child after another shortly after birth until finally his grandfather, who lived. In another ancient Bible, the word “adultery” is angrily underlined everywhere it occurs. Heartbreak, joy; these Bibles are imbued with powerful emotion. They are the richest possible materials to work with because of that.

That said, when I find them, they are at the end of their intended lives. They come to me literally falling apart, in pieces, dying. I revive them for a new purpose as sculpture. The subtext? What awaits after the end of what we think is our lives might be more beautiful than anything we imagined. In doing so, I aim to resurrect a bit of the spirit poured into these books and a bit of the spirit poured into me by my father.

Getty has become an invaluable resource on how to work with and preserve the pages of the Bibles so that they are not just archival but can function for decades or hundreds of years as three-dimensional sculpture. I have researched the Getty Museum’s Department of Paper Conservation regarding topics such as adhesives used by conservators. The Getty Research Institute’s database holds historical perspectives in paper works conservation.

Conservation is half of my relationship with Getty. I’m also interested in the contemporary work it exhibits, pieces that interrogate our assumptions about our relationships with materials, museums, and archivability. The exhibition of Uta Barth’s work resonated because it questioned what it means to photograph things such as light that are fundamentally ephemeral.

My engagement with an object’s “life cycle” has led me to consider our relationships with all materials, especially “sacred” things such as artworks. The Conservation Institute book Living Matter resonated with me because it explores how contemporary artworks use biological or transient material to investigate ephemerality and materiality.

Getty is an integral silent partner in my art. And when I see the Museum thronging with people, I imagine my father sitting there, sketching people’s faces in the margins of the visitors’ guide.