A Sculptor of Soulful Contradictions

To encounter the work of Susannah Montague is to be drawn into a delicate storm. Imagine porcelain as both lullaby and scream, a fragile shell holding centuries of myth, memory, and mischief. Based on Bowen Island, Canada, Montague’s ceramic sculptures don’t simply exist—they haunt, seduce, and tease the boundary between sacred and absurd.

At first glance, her works charm: gleaming dolls, pastel tones, bubbles mid-burst. But stay longer—what you thought was innocence shifts into something more feral. A bunny seems too watchful. A baby sprouts horns. The wings of angels flicker with an eerie stillness. Her art lives in duality: a baroque marriage of death and delight.

The Language of Porcelain

Montague’s process is rooted in clay, yes—but more so, in time. Her hands coax narratives from press molds, hand-building techniques, and slip-casting, echoing ceramic traditions while defying them in the same breath. Each object is imbued with potent symbolism: skulls and flowers, bubbles and insects, signs of impermanence and rebirth. Interwoven are casts of toys—Kewpie dolls, helicopters, plastic bunnies—that inject both kitsch and commentary, suggesting that childhood itself is a fragile, fevered dream.

I invent art to heal and hopefully inspire, my sculptures know more than they let on.

– She shares.

It’s this knowing that makes her pieces more than aesthetic—they’re oracles.

Beauty in the Absurd

There’s a surrealist logic to Montague’s work—if logic is even the right word. The figures are familiar yet twisted, uncanny as dreams remembered sideways. A sculpture might resemble a saint’s reliquary as imagined by someone raised on cartoons and paganism. Her aesthetic philosophy owes as much to Max Ernst as it does to Instagram-era nostalgia, welded into a voice that is uniquely her own.

Her recurring use of the Latin phrase “Si vis amari, ama” (“If you want to be loved, love”) is not sentimental, but radical. Love, in her world, isn’t passive—it’s confrontation, vulnerability, and ritual. And when the world locked down during the pandemic, it wasn’t galleries that kept her going—it was the kiln’s whisper, her twins’ laughter, and the ceramic warriors she birthed in her studio at midnight.

The Artist as Alchemist

Montague’s studio is a sanctum where science and spirit converge. Clay dries, cracks, and sometimes betrays her. Glazes transform in the kiln with alchemical trickery, demanding a kind of devotional patience.

The material has the final say over who you are as an artist, it can be humbling—and humiliating.

– She explains.

This dance of control and chaos is intrinsic to her message. In a world where algorithms polish away risk, Montague’s pieces feel raw, alive. There’s grief here, and satire, and fierce love, often all in the same sculpture. She calls them her soul counterparts—and indeed, they feel inhabited by something ancient.

The Golden Fleece and the Warrior Within

In 2020, Montague’s The Golden Fleece sculpture earned her the 3rd Prize in the Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award as part of the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize. Created during pandemic-induced chaos, the piece was a culmination of desperation, passion, and persistence—a symbolic warrior cloaked not in armor, but myth.

It symbolizes strength and protection. The willingness to fight for your beliefs.

– Montague says.

The award arrived as the world stood still, validating not just her craft but her message: that art can be both a shield and a prayer.

What the Sculptures Whisper

Montague’s creations don’t scream—they murmur. Secrets are baked into their glazed folds. Some hold hidden relics, never meant to be seen. Others radiate an energy that seems to watch the viewer as much as be seen by them. “They are saying something,” she insists, “even if no one hears them but me.”

But people do hear them. Her audience—growing globally—resonates with her vulnerability, the deeply personal threads that bind porcelain and philosophy. What might have once been labeled “decorative” now commands full conceptual reverence.

Beyond the Kiln

For Montague, sculpture is not an endpoint, but a medium through which her subconscious crystallizes into form. Her artistic voice—nurtured through training at Emily Carr University and OCAD—has been honed in the film industry, the fine art world, and, most of all, the solitude of her island studio.

As she prepares for her solo exhibition at Newzones Gallery in Calgary and ships new work to Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco, her momentum is only increasing. Yet her intentions remain intimate.

One day, I hope my kids see one of my sculptures in a gallery and feel me saying how much I love them.

A Shared Humanity in Clay

Montague’s ceramics are not simply objects. They’re sermons in porcelain, stitched from childhood and shadow, from saints and stickers, from heartbreak and hope. In a culture addicted to irony, she dares sincerity. In a world where beauty is filtered and flat, she builds it in three dimensions—fragile, cracked, and entirely alive.

To view her work is to remember something primal: that we are creatures of cycles, of laughter and loss, of stories passed in silence. And somewhere inside a horned doll or a bubble mid-pop, Susannah Montague has hidden a part of herself—and maybe, a part of us too.