Even in Susan Read Cronin’s most whimsical sculptures, there’s an underlying sense of dire tension.
To Have and To Hold, for example, depicts a warm, potentially romantic embrace between a rabbit and a carrot. Cronin’s furry subject gazes down at the lifeless vegetable—cradled in the rabbit’s long, anthropomorphized arms—with ambiguous desire.
“There’s a little element of danger. Is he gonna eat it? But he loves it so much. Maybe he won’t, maybe he will,” teased Cronin, whose work is currently featured in a new exhibition at the Elverhoj Museum of History and Art in Solvang.
The Montecito-based sculptor plays with similar themes in another piece, To the Rescue, which depicts an army of acorns at war with a hungry squirrel.
Cronin said she originally wanted to show her two-legged acorns running away from the squirrel in fear, but the piece eventually evolved into a rescue mission instead, with the acorns charging their enemy in a courageous attempt to save one of their own from being eaten.
While almost all of Cronin’s bronze sculptures involve animals, she doesn’t have any pets of her own at the moment—any domesticated pets at least.
“I actually have a squirrel that’s outside all the time and looks in the window at me. So I sort of feel like he’s kind of my pet,” said Cronin, whose new solo show—Fables, Foibles, and Fairy Tales—is scheduled to premiere on Jan. 29.
Cronin’s bronze characters will remain on display at the Elverhoj Museum through April 24, alongside a collection of her poems and silhouette artworks as well.
While Cronin has specialized in casting bronze since the 1990s, poetry became one of her new favorite art forms during the pandemic. Similar to her sculptures, Cronin’s poems are often playful and full of humorous twists.
She described “Once Upon a Time”—one of her featured poems in the exhibit—as “Mad Libs for fairy tales.” The poem has been blown up into a large display for the showcase, but Cronin hasn’t seen it for herself yet.
“I think it’s like 8 feet or something, so it’s going to be hanging in a big panel,” she said.
The Elverhoj Museum staff insisted on installing the exhibit without Cronin’s assistance, the artist said, which she was thrilled about. The thought of walking blindly into a showcase of her own work excited her.
“The idea of someone else interpreting my work in their own way and seeing how it connects and in what ways they’re going to display it is going to be really fun,” Cronin said.
When it comes to hearing different interpretations of her work, Cronin’s favorites are often the ones that stray far from her intended context.
“Sometimes I don’t like to tell my backstory about a piece because I want to hear what your story about the piece is because you’re bringing your own experience to it,” she said. “I want to put things out in the world that make people think twice, or they can have a good time with.”
Cronin aims to leave her sculptures open-ended, with ample room for the consumer to interact and improvise. Dive In, for example, is a piece that begs to be played with, the artist explained.
The piece consists of two separate sculptures, a mouse poised on the edge of a spoon as if it’s a diving board, and a tea cup for the rodent to land in—or not.
“I don’t want to glue this onto a base, or have it nailed down,” said Cronin, opening the door to infinite alternate realities. “If he wants to dive into a bowl of mashed potatoes or whipped cream, you just take the cup away and put whatever you want him to dive into.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood needs a reality check at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 3, 2022.