About Surculus

Annabel Darden

It began with a childhood fascination for the magic I found in nature – the various textures, colors, and elemental energies. I felt a part of the symbiosis and I wanted to engage with the vitality of plants, trees, and animals. On hikes, I would make little altars with sticks, moss, and stones. It was my way of communicating to the ecosystem that I could see its sacredness.
 
This deeply observational perspective is what continues to generate my artistry. When I found clay during my studies at Scripps College it felt familiar. Rather than struggling to convey the feel of nature two-dimensionally, I could mold the element itself in full form. It removed a degree of separation between the art and the subject and evoked a fully somatic experience.
 
There’s something so beautifully primal about working with clay and having your hands covered in mud. Ceramics has such ancient roots and yet it stretches to match modern art and innovation. I’ve come to find that sometimes the most precious things are also the simplest.
 
Clay can so easily be imbued with the essence of the moments in which it is made – the joy, contemplation, or curiosity experienced is forever memorialized in that object. 

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Janet has shown me a dance with fluid forms and a greater comfort with creative risk. Her gift with wood has opened me to a wider range of materials, textures and techniques. I am so very grateful for her mentorship, partnership and friendship.

Janet Fryer

As a child of parents who were makers it became second nature to me to have the curiosity about how things are made, learn how to make things myself. To not be afraid to make things myself.

My original trade, the only professional training I have ever had, was cutting hair. I trained with Vidal Sassoon and have always considered hair dressing a form of sculpture, as is dressmaking. Taking a given material and shaping it.

30 years ago my family and I moved from England to California. I was invited into the art form of painting by a woman who remains my closest friend still. In this I consider myself to be an abstract painter more interested in texture and movement, creating atmospheres and mood, rather than rendering a perfect image.

Sculpting and use of wood has always been an interest, the beaches, side walks and parks here offer up natures bounty and discards in which I see future forms. My continued curiosity of materials and how to use them has led me to meet Annabel, together we marry our love of form and nature, in my opinion, giving movement and texture where once it remained still, at the same time her youth and vitality giving me, once again, delight in the unknown, birthing Surculus.