An Artist’s Self-Fulfillment

Talking to Pam Sutherland is similar to the experience of engaging with any art: your sensibilities become hyper-focused, more gently attuned to life outside the frame. Serious but friendly, wearing big glasses and decisively colorful clothing, she is the kind of person that relishes accidental beauty, understanding that the aesthetic isn’t found only in art but instead helps concentrate it. Her pieces, primarily dealing in collage for the last 20 years, aim, she says, to make the impermanent permanent. Secured in a frame, the items she works with — fabrics, debris, colored tape, wire, wood — become something new. The things other people discard she takes pleasure in, polishing them through the virtues of her art. “My practice starts with the material,” she says. “It leads me, but often I don’t know where it’s going. Everything I choose to work with sparks joy for me, but convincing the viewer that it is more than meaningless ephemera is the challenge.”

The physical facts of these items and the former lives they carried are manipulated and made fresh, but the pasts they bear still cast loving shadows on the work, haunting it. “I think that’s what art does in general,” Sutherland says, “it allows you to hold on to things.” A purple jacket zipper, in one of her pieces, fashioned to a student’s discarded styrofoam paint palette, blooms as though it were a flower among grassy paint. The zipper remains a zipper but now carries an additional form, the same way a cup can become a flower vase. As collage, these objects, heavily worked but still light, are held together disparately — not necessarily harmoniously joined, for no two things exist together completely without friction, but comfortable. “I think my materials, at their core, are sentimental, which is sometimes a bad word in art,” she says. “Some relationships fade and loved ones die, but art allows you to hold on to these people through the quotidian evidence of their lives.”

Sutherland’s work is featured in several public collections, including the Try-me Collection, the University of Virginia, the Federal Reserve Bank and Wells Fargo Bank. With a Bachelor of Arts degree from William & Mary and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, she’s been a practicing professional artist for decades, but, even with such distinction, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that Sutherland found the form of expression she was most comfortable with. By training a painter, she found collage the same way so much art is made: by serendipitous, happy accident.

“If I’m truthful, there was always an element of something physical in the paint, even when I was in undergrad,” Sutherland explains. “I would make a painting on a huge canvas, a self portrait, for example, and I would cut up scraps of canvas and glue them into the pieces. So I often had a 3D element embedded in a 2D work.”

The winner of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts fellowship in 2005 for drawing and the 2009 recipient of the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in Fine Art, given by Richmond Magazine, Sutherland enjoyed early success in her career as an artist, but she feels that only now is she making her best work. “I really love making stuff in a way now that I don’t think I felt as much when I was younger,” she says. “Even though I have an MFA in painting, I always felt somewhat of an imposter as a painter. When I started collage, and appropriating color, my work started to feel much more my own.” 

An artist’s style is a fulfillment of one’s sensibilities. That sensibility, the endless process of becoming yourself, is always there, but an artist needs to find that within themselves. “For me, it’s taken wisdom and confidence and trust in myself to get here,” Sutherland says. “When I’m working on something now I just feel it in my gut if it’s something I need to pursue. In the past, self-doubt might have precluded action. Now I just go for it.”

As the arts program director and an Upper School art teacher, Sutherland tries to help students develop their own confidence and creative intuition. “I definitely teach through the lens of being an artist, not necessarily an art educator,” she says. “I want my students to think like artists. Teaching through the lens of an artist builds in an appreciation for the open-endedness that can inform both process and outcome. It’s less formulaic.”

She recognizes that, like every artist, every student is different. The work of an art teacher is to help each student discover their own form and taste. That sometimes involves moving through uncertainty and doubt, but the reward, when it comes, is worth it. “My job is to tease out each student’s ‘special something’ and have them invest in it,” she says. “Everyone has something that sets them apart. You just have to help them find it. The mystery of self-discovery is the capital A of art. Every year I try to get students to be comfortable with not knowing where they and their work are headed. It requires them to get lost in what they’re doing, silence their inner critic and enjoy what’s happening.” Knowing the process well, Sutherland is helping students find themselves. Any art, in a way, fulfills itself; the work is just waiting on the artist.