You think I’m not a goddess?

Try me.

This is a torch song.

Touch me and you’ll burn.

• Margaret Atwood, Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing

In the early history of contemporary figurative ceramics – dating to the beginning of the 18th century in Meissen, Germany which introduced the first western-based high-temperature blast kilns – a crack in the culture occurs which, piquantly, opened male-dominated society to the expressive force in female identity and the potential for women to be their own agents of artifice, rather than simply the subject. 

That populist shift is represented in a series of fine porcelain ceramic figurines crafted in the 1720s based on characters in the Italian Commedia dell’arte. Whereas early British ceramic figurative work featured nostalgic pastoral scenes – women feeding chickens – the first German masters were drawn to the new populist spirit in the Commedia characters – Pantalone, Harlequin and the mischievous Columbine. The Commedia, performed for free in public market squares by a traveling troupe of actors beginning in Italy in the mid-1600s, was a transgressive force in popular culture – its improvised stories, uncensored by the court, could be provocative. And for the first time, the Commedia allowed women to be actors on the stage – as both bearers as well as creators of stories – a century before they were permitted to do so in Elizabethan England. In those early Meissen figurines of Columbine and the Innamorata, a new archetype was crafted – the self-sufficient, rational, quick-witted woman. Holding her own. Here was the first physical recognition of the diva, il diva; not royalty, not a deity, not the Virgin Mary, but a female creative agent deserving her own place of stature and adornment. Those small figurines marked the start of a revolution.

Like the Commedia, there is a carnivalesque joy to Vancouver artist Suzy Birstein’s large scale figurative sculptures. Initiated as an ongoing series in 2017, Birstein’s figurative works, her Ladies-Not-Waiting (a clapback reference to Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which translates as ‘The Ladies-in-waiting’) manifest a pantheon of artists – all female – who infuse her life with meaning and purpose. Birstein’s sculptures are a performative spectacle of colour, ornamentation, and art history allusions. Part bust, part theatre-in-the-round, these are characters telling stories about themselves, spellbinding in their intricacy. The story of each spools out around the sculpted figure, with objects and embellishments that create a magic realism spin on the person represented. Wondrous and fecund with allegorical symbols, Birstein’s sculptures are trenchant representations of the mystical power in female self-narratives, and of her own artful ability to charm an audience.

Birstein’s choice of figurative subjects is telling of her own personal story. Born in a Jewish enclave north of Toronto in the conformist 1950s, Birstein, breaking free, worked as an artist’s model and solo-travelled extensively through Europe before moving to Vancouver to study ceramics at Emily Carr University. Her travels informed her intrigue about representations of women in art. During extended periods in Greece, she would stand in the presence of the korai, the monumental sculpted female figures used as architectural supports in classic Greek architecture. The korai (the word translates as ‘maidens’) were women, not gods, placed in an elevated position, a high place of stature and they exude a powerful mystical presence. On trips to Madrid, seeing the figurative work of  Velázquez and Picasso, Birstein considered the identity of the muse – both the goddesses inspiring (mostly male) creativity and the female models serving to give it form. And in Mexico City, Birstein found common cause with Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington – rebels determined to break pictorial constraints and do something different, and fantastical, in telling their story. 

In Birstein’s hands, Carrington and Kahlo – along with notable other female luminaries such as Vali Myers, Artemisia Gentileschi and Leonor Fini – have found new life, new narrative potential. Leonora Carrington – the surrealist social rebel, born in conservative England, who escaped to colour, dreams and personal liberty in 1930s Mexico – is Birstein’s frequent wingman and kindred spirit. Carrington’s visage appears as Birstein’s The Debutante (2024), with her decolletage of wild horses an allegory to strength and personal freedom. Also a novelist, Carrington wrote about the ‟legendary powers” inherent in female artistry and there is that same spirited alchemy present in Birstein’s sculptural work. Figurative ceramics practiced as a form of storytelling, mythmaking, and sisterhood. Intended to be both iconic and iconoclastic, Birstein’s work elevates the status of female identity while breaking visual norms. Each piece has an enchanted presence.

No matter their fantastical composition and art history associations, Birstein’s figurative sculptures are grounded in the truth of contemporary social relevance. Like the female actors in the Commedia, these are working women striving to stand out; not goddesses, but still powerful, filled with mythic potential. And they speak to our time as much as their own. Consider Birstein’s At The Folies Bergere…After Manet (2021). In her version of Suzon – the real life barmaid that Manet used as his model in his 1882 painting – this enigmatic figure is marked by Birstein’s empathy and hope. She is introverted but defiant, commanding her own space, resplendent in her own aura, a champagne supernova about her head like a crown. A working girl deity, a commoner queen. In Birstein’s intriguing work, there is always another way, rapturously, to tell the story of female identity and diva power. 

Barry Dumka

Vancouver, 2025

© Barry Dumka/BCREATIVE CONSULTING