Susie Lee is a visual artist and CEO of Siren and is January’s speaker on the theme of UGLY. We’re currently sold out, but we’ll do our best to get as many folks off the waitlist as we can! You can get more information about January’s event here.
CMSEA: How do you define creativity and apply it in your career?
SL: Creativity applies playfulness and curiosity to clarity of vision and problem solving. It is a daily practice of generating and discarding, questioning and executing, holding on and letting go. It is being comfortable in an “I don’t know” kind of space, and living well with uncertainty. For me, it’s also emerges from the self-regulated pressure-cooker of deadline panic and knowledge of impending public presentations.
CMSEA: Where do you find your best creative inspiration?
SL: Inspiration in one discipline almost always comes from experiences from another discipline. For example, video portraits have been inspired by paintings, sculptures by contemporary performance, digital objects by micro-fiction, or start ups through art-making. Translating specific aspects from one medium to another, whether it be an emotional landscape, tone, shape of the narrative, or concept is one of the most challenging and satisfying parts of the creative process.
CMSEA: What’s the one creative advice or tip you wish you’d known as a young person?
SL: When your practice is creating things that haven’t existed before, there isn’t a path already laid out.People will tell you ninety different ways how you “should” do a thing, and whole process is entirely uncomfortable when your choices deviates from the opinion of others. But you are allowed to change your mind as many times as necessary. And then, soon you find out you don’t have to care as much what others think when you don’t follow the “should” they prescribed because, for all the how-to information out there, no one knows how to forge, not only a path, but a direction for you.
CMSEA: Who would you like to hear speak at CreativeMornings?
SL: I’d like to see artist Tania Bruguera. Her long-term art projects meld social justice and aesthetics, and she was just freed from detention in Cuba.
CMSEA: How does your life and career compare to what you envisioned for your future when you were a sixth grader?
SL: I wanted to be a hand surgeon in sixth grade. I am currently a new media artist and creative entrepreneur. In both paths, one’s actions create change in the world. Where those paths deviate is in the realm of financial security:-)
CMSEA: What books made a difference in your life and why?
SL: A smattering: Jose Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon; Lydia Davis’ We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders; Jorge Luis Borges Library of Babel. They all begin with a “what if” premise and then each author digs in cleverly, honestly, and with focused imagination as to what happens. In these cases, a historian changes one word to “not,” an editor analyzes fourth grade composition, and there exists an infinite library of all books from all times.
