Woman With Grackle

Susan Curry has been making art ever since she could hold a paintbrush. Though she spent decades working in sales for a fitness company, her creative impulse followed her to Sarasota more than 30 years ago, when she left England, and immediately became her full-time calling. Curry utilizes everything from metal to palm sheaths in her work, even transforming her own front lawn into a gallery for bold political pieces. Though she has spent a lifetime moving between mediums, mosaics didn’t enter her practice until the pandemic. When supply stores shut down, she turned to what she had on hand: dishes and salvaged material she’d saved for years. Working cross-legged on a paint- and adhesive-stained floor, she surrounds herself with hundreds of fragments, moving them into simple compositions where women and nature take center stage like this mosaic of a woman with a great-tailed grackle. “I make a mess, it looks like a hurricane,” she says with a laugh. “But I love the simplicity. It comes from the heart.”