CS: How are you?

SJ: I’m good, how are you?

CS: I feel extremely honored and grateful that you’ve taken the time to talk with me. 

SJ: Oh of course, it’s my honor as well. 

CS: I’m in love with what’s come out of you with your words and the way that you’ve been able to capture such a sweet, profound, spiritual message with your painting is equally inspiring and I’m very happy to hear that the show was extended until October 6.

SJ: Thank you, that means so much to me. 

CS: What other influences or experiences, besides having a painter mother, shaped your artistic perspective and inspired you while creating this body of work?

SJ: I grew up with a visual artist as a mother and in some ways that was my primary creative influence. I grew up around painters and going to museums all the time. One of the biggest influences for me has been Frida Kahlo who my mom introduced me to when I was 13 years old. I had a unibrow and we were having fights over my desire to pluck it and I remember her showing me a photo of Frida and telling me about her. I was struck by her beauty but also by her ability to embrace what the world and what conventional beauty standards might deem to be “flaws” and not only lean into those things, but to really make them one of her defining iconic traits. About a decade later in the months following my first leukemia diagnosis when I was stuck at home and feeling isolated, not just because the medical isolation because of my immune system, but also the social isolation of being young and so sick and confined to my bed most of the time, I reencountered Frida through her diaries which my mom gifted to me. And I came to understand that, that notion of not only embracing what might be considered a flaw or a limitation but really leaning into it was extraordinarily inspiring to me, because she was in a horrific bus accident that had left her confined to her bed right around the same age I was at that time. 

CS: Oh wow. 

SJ: And rather than feeling sorry for herself and watching endless hours of TV in bed or whatever you choose to do when you find yourself in a situation like that, she taught herself to paint. And not only to paint, but to depict the terrifying realities of her body and to take things that most people might want to conceal or look away from and actually look deeper into them. And so, I began to study this long lineage that we have of artists and writers who found themselves bedridden because of mental illness or other forms of illness, and made the very thing that plagued them their subject. So she,Virginia Wolfe, Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag and these various thinkers and artists who probed the very topic that plagued them and turned it into a subject of curiosity, intrigue and artistry was my first inclination to think about how I might creatively engage with my own illness and limitations. And how to use my imagination as its own vehicle at a time where I was really feeling so stuck, not just geographically but in every sense.

CS: Drafting my questions, I wrote down names that came to me as possible influences; Hilma Af Klint or Agnes Pelton because I do see a lot of similarities in the spiritual and abstract parts of the work but, Frida Kahlo is spot on, I can see similar storytelling and visions that you were experiencing in this state with your senses being affected which is really beautiful. 

SJ: So, fast forwarding to when I did actually start painting, I had entered the hospital with a diaper caddy which sounds bizarre, but I had packed a diaper caddy that I had at my bedside table filled with journals and my favorite pens and boxes of watercolors that a friend had gifted to me. I was really thinking to myself I was going to really make sense of whatever this new set of challenges was going to bring with words because that's what I had done my entire childhood and adult life. So when I was put on these medications that compromised my vision and made it really challenging to write, it was one of those moments once again where I thought to myself I could feel bad for myself. My one coping tool is no longer available, “woe is me”. But once again influenced by people like Frida Kahlo, felt like an invitation to creatively engage with that limitation in a new way. And I think I had this foundation just from spending afternoons after school in my mom’s studio and playing with everything from charcoal sticks, to oil paints, to water colors, and I think what felt the most exciting to me was the idea that I could transcribe these night terrors and hallucinations that I was having. I wasn’t trained in visual art but the goal wasn’t to be a good artist or to achieve some kind of technical excellence or likeness and that felt really freeing. 

CS: Yeah, how you describe your preparation to make something out of this next phase of your life feels like a commitment and the courage to pursue creativity by all means necessary. Was it scary to see these images and knowing you weren't going to be able to write about them? Or, was there an immediate surrender to a new way of expressing your creativity?

SJ: So I knew the vision loss from the medication was temporary and I have my workarounds for writing like using voice memos and recording on my phone, so that was available to me still just not with the same kind of ease that I look for when I turn to the journal where I can just unspool my thoughts without caring where they're leading to. I was looking for ease and some kind of creative medium and watercolor seemed fitting. Largely because I watched my friend Melissa Carol, who I had met a decade earlier in the very same hospital recovering from my first transplant, paint these extraordinary self portraits in watercolors from bed and she had always told me the thing she loved most about water color is that they’re hard to control and it felt like a perfect metaphor for life with illness. So, I had this intuitive sense that watercolor might be the place to find that ease because they kind of blur and bloom on the paper just like my vision was blurring and blooming. I wasn’t planning to have an art exhibit or to show my work to anyone so in a way those first water colors felt like a visual journal or diary. 

CS: I love the way you just described that. Watercolors can be a little controversial because yes, they are so hard to control! There is this movement and flow that comes with using watercolors that I feel really scares people. It can feel very final once you get something on the paper. There are a lot of throughlines in regards to water in this show. Like some of the titles of the work; Shape of Waters, 2024, Drowning Practice, 2024, Take Me to the River East, 2024. Was that intentional?

SJ: Absolutely. Around the time that I got sick again in 2022, I was struggling to stay asleep and I would do what many of us do and scroll and the algorithm kept showing me these videos of babies essentially being taught how not to drown. Where they are thrown into the deep end of the pool and are taught to flip over on their backs and to float. It seemed almost too neat of a metaphor, but it really did feel like I was drowning in this ocean of uncertainty and the instinct when you feel like fighting against the current and doggy paddle as hard as you can to keep your head above water everyday, but that is the fastest way to drown. Spending your energy stores by kicking and flailing and the thing to do to save your life is to surrender to the current and float. So, I was thinking a lot about water and you're absolutely right about watercolor, you’re in collaboration with water and you’re not fighting it, you’re following its lead and observing where it takes you. Thinking about my mom in those early days of painting in the hospital, I would come in and I would say; “Oh, I made a big mess in this corner of paper!” and she would always say; “Watercolors are about happy accidents and where you might see a mess is where the energy is and what’s going to end up being the most interesting part of the painting so keep going there. Don't try to lift the pigment out or try to erase, just keep following its lead and playing with it.” So, the medium of watercolor itself felt very much like lessons in surrender and acceptance at a time when the circumstances of my life called for surrender and acceptance. 

CS: Fast forwarding to the curation of The Alchemy of Blood, being in tandem with your mother who was pregnant with you while making some of the works of hers that are featured. Water as it serves the purpose of being our main life source and force in utero, the connections made here are really wildly synchronistic. What are some of the feelings that come up around this particular synchronicity? 

SJ: There is a kind of magical synchronicity in all of it honestly. Like my mom, I’m not a strategy driven person, I’m very much guided by intuition and largely a necessity because for much of my adult life, whenever I’ve had a one, two year, or five year plan, it’s been imploded by illness. So in the absence of the ability to make plans, even plans for the day, I’m just guided by the electricity and where the magic is. I feel my mom lives her life very similarly. So I think intuitively in a way that wasn't clear perhaps until a couple of days until the show opened. We were seeing all of the different pieces laid out and I could understand some of those deeper connections of water even in terms of color. I was struck walking around the exhibition how much we gravitate towards certain color palettes and organic forms found in nature. Even looking at her Shields, if you look at them closely they are quite literally her visual diaries and journals. You see little notes written in the tiles and scraps of paper that came from her diaries. And so that combination of the written and the visual isn't even something that had occurred to me until I saw it all together. 

SJ: I think the most eerie of synchronicities is the video installation piece, Cost of Living, 2020, that we made when I was relapsing and didn't know it yet and it was something we really did on a whim. The thing about having an artist as a mother is that we’re always doing little creative projects just for the hell of it without any intention of them ever seeing the light of day. So that video piece arose from when she came to visit me in Frenchtown where I was in residency in 2020, and out of nowhere I asked her if she had my boxes of medical bills and we started thinking about what we could do with them like a collage or some kind of ritual but then we arrived on the idea of this video piece which we made over the span of a couple of days just for fun. So to have what is perhaps the only collaboration piece in the show be something that we created years before that was so thematically relevant to The Alchemy of Blood, was again this kind of magical throughline that we didn't even know was a throughline until it all came together. 

CS: I used to be a doula and I’m really interested in the relationship between mothers and their children in utero and beyond, so noticing all the connections and stepping back and even seeing the colors you used and you being a writer and your mothers diary pages with her writings being used was stunning to see. The Cost of Living and your mother’s collections of Shields are some of my favorite works in the show. The concept of maternal protection is particularly fascinating to me and your mother made that motherly protection tangible with these Shields dedicated to you in the show. What does this kind of artistic and spiritual protection feel like for you?

SJ: Of course we have the mother daughter relationship but we also have the caregiver patient relationship. That desire for protection goes both ways and it’s so umbilical in a sense. For your child to get sick or face death before you is almost like a breach of contract with the natural order of things. I think I’ve always felt protective of my parents in the context of my illness and just keenly aware of how heartbreaking it is to watch your child fall so sick and I think the interesting thing about this show and even just about the time I started painting in the hospital is it allowed us to shift out of those identities of mother-daughter, patient-caregiver relationship,  and to speak to each other artist to artist. And that proved so incredibly healing because when she would come to the hospital everyday instead of spending all day reviewing test results and monitoring pain levels, we were talking about shared love which is creative work. I think in terms of being an adult, especially a young adult who fell sick, that need for independence can be a tricky one. It requires a severing of the umbilical cord and that happened for the first time I got sick and the second time as well where I got to a point where I was in the recovery phase of treatment. I needed to learn to stand on my own two feet and to resist the temptation to lean on my mother or even tell her I don't need protection, I have to learn how to keep myself safe. So I think uncovering this new artist to artist dynamic is something that allowed us to deepen that bond in a way that of course is connected to that mother daughter relationship, but kind of shifts the focus and in a way that has been so beautiful and endlessly lifegiving. 

CS: Do you find yourself particularly drawn to themes or elements that resonate with childlike wonder or do you believe your work possesses an inherent quality that captures a sense of awe and curiosity typically associated with childhood? The place that this work came from can be rather dark considering the visions came from hallucinations from your medications and night terrors, however, there is such a jovial spirit in some of the ways the animals are captured it feels like friendly animal spirits visiting you, was that the experience or was that what it became when the work was coming out of you?

SJ: I think both, childlike wonder is an essential ingredient to any creative work you have to liberate yourself from expectation of an outcome in order to really delve into the creative process in a way where you’re not trying to control it’s direction and your giving yourself the freedom to explore and experiment and uncover truths beneath truths and to notice what appears that maybe wasn't part of your plan or your structure. So these animals were a part of these hallucinations that I was having and the very first painting I made was a kind of self portrait with a snake coiled tightly around my neck and I woke up in a cold sweat and I was really frightened and got up and began to paint . And the act of painting it very quickly deveined that night terror and made it less scary and more interesting. Then I started to read about the symbolism of snakes and understand that rather than being a symbol of danger, they're actually symbols of rebirth and fertility. My relationship to the thing that initially frightening me began to fascinate me so I have been a lifelong animal lover, I was kid who was constantly rescuing strays and volunteering at the local vet clinic and animal shelter and so I began to think of these animals as almost book of revelation-esque symbols for my own kind of Noah's arc. And I do think there is a sort of childlike wonder, but more than that a kind of portal into a sort of magical thinking that felt especially nourishing at a time where I was confined to a hospital room under these very harsh fluorescent lights where I wasn't allowed to leave my room. I couldn't open my window. I certainly couldn't get on a plane and go anywhere but I could use my imagination as a sort of portal and to these strange landscapes with these magical creatures.

CS: There’s the innocence that's captured that is very palpable and inspiring and I hope there’s a book or something in the works that these images will accompany because it’s just a sweet whimsical ride that you go on exploring this show. Although the subject matter is a little uncomfortable. 

SJ: I don't think the more discomforting elements of the painting as dark because the one certainty in our lives is our mortality, the one shared experience that no matter how much we don’t want to think about we will all come to experience and so that that contrast between what might feel uncomfortable with these more sort of wondrous or whimsical images is in my mind really our work is to hold the uncomfortable and hard facts of life with the beautiful and wondrous ones in the same palm. And often we’re having to do those things simultaneously, most of our lives are neither good or bad, we exist somewhere in the messy middle.

Suleika Jaouad has recently announced a book, THE BOOK OF ALCHEMY, available April 22, 2025. You can preorder here.

Image Credits:

Photo by Miana Jun

Suleika Jaouad, Drowning Practice, 2024, Suleika Jaouad & Anne Francey, The Cost of Living, 2020, Suleika Jaouad, Blood Ballet, 2024, Suleika Jaouad, Fertile Crescent, 2024, Suleika Jaouad, The Sacrifice, 2024