I first met Sue Bergin in November 2016 during an extremely difficult time. My father-in-law Edward L. Kimball was in his final days, and Sue arrived to provide medicine and hospice care at his home in Provo, UT. Her cheerful demeanor, skill and confidence, and her recognition and affirmation of Edward’s Life-Well-Lived was both consolation and lasting inspiration.
More recently I have followed Sue’s Facebook postings of artful arrangements made of natural elements like leaves, buds, nuts, berries and other of Mother Nature’s gifts. Sue, who brought solace and understanding to my life, was now sharing wordless, visual celebrations of nature with everyone – at least on Facebook and Instagram. It is an honor to highlight her as a Segullah artist for this new year.
Segullah: Tell us a bit about your life. You can start from the beginning.
Sue: I was raised in New Jersey until age 15, when my family moved to Provo. I went to BYU, then got a master’s in journalism from Northwestern and an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA. I’ve been a newspaper and magazine reporter, a PR writer and spokesperson for BYU, a hospice chaplain, and an adjunct university writing professor.
Segullah: That’s an amazing resumé!
Sue: I’m the second oldest of nine children, and the oldest daughter. My mom had triplets when I was 16.
Segullah: That’s quite the family!
Sue: I helped a ton with the care of the triplets and have been super attached to them all their lives. Two have died now, which has been very difficult and is partly what led me to hospice chaplaincy work. There’s a lot of grief counseling in hospice, and I felt well prepared for that from my experiences with loss and also from clinical chaplain training.
Two of the triplets are gay (one deceased), and I learned some hard lessons from them that led me to become an LGBT ally and advocate. This cause is bedrock important to me.
Segullah: I have been impressed with your advocacy. Have you wanted to be a visual artist since you were a child?
Sue: I loved drawing and making art starting in childhood, like most of us do. Over the years, I dabbled in pastels, watercolors, and crochet designs of my own. When in my early 40s I expressed to a friend the idea of becoming a visual artist, they discouraged me because it takes “about 25 years” to become established. I listened and didn’t pursue my dream. That’s just about the amount of time that has now passed since I first had those stirrings in earnest.
Segullah: You create art with both your heart and soul.
Sue: I hope to develop my art enough eventually to sometimes convey how much I value justice and equality. My mom tells a story about how tiny I was as a child (I’m still small – 5’1”) and how she and my dad were shocked when I took back my tricycle from an older boy who had taken it and gave him a black eye.
Segullah: More, please.
Sue: Later, in grade school at Oradell Elementary in New Jersey, where I grew up until age 15, we were shown Holocaust newsreels starting in the fourth grade. I remember being deeply impacted and asked to “go to temple” (synagogue) with a Jewish friend. Later, on my walks to junior high every day, I passed a Christian Science Reading Room, and I got up the courage a few times to go inside and read about Mary Baker Eddy.
My interfaith perspective was born.
Also in grade school, I read the book Black Boy by Richard Wright and was horrified. We lived in a mostly white suburb of New York City, and I didn’t know about the Jim Crow south or the segregated cities in the north.
My anti-racism was born.
At the age of 13, my junior high Spanish teacher encouraged the girls to attend a school board meeting about the unequal budget for girls’ sports vs. boys’ sports. We packed the room.
My feminism was born.
In my 20s and 30s, when I was attending singles’ wards in Washington, D.C., Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles, I became friends with many LDS gay men (I was not aware of any gay women, but I’m sure they were there). They seemed perfectly fine to me, as opposed to what the church communicated about “homosexuality,” and this prepared me to support my two brothers when they came out.
Segullah: So you have been an advocate for the underrecognized and underserved for decades.
Sue: I guess that’s true. I had trouble focusing on a career because I really wanted to be a wife and mom. I’m one of those who didn’t feel pressured to be those things but truly intrinsically wanted them.
When they didn’t happen, I have had the ongoing challenge of navigating life without a partner or children plus the stigma and “lesser life” feelings that go with that circumstance in the LDS subculture. Being single and childless is fine for some women and those who choose it, but that has not been the case for me.
Segullah: Tell us more about how that impacted you.
Sue: For about six years in my late thirties and early forties, I experienced persistent clinical depression. None of the Big Three in my life had worked out – Love, Work, Faith.
A relationship had failed, signaling to me the likely end of my chances to marry and have children (I was right). My work life had failed (I spent 11 years in Los Angeles trying to break into screenwriting). And my faith failed me as a single person, and also as a person with questions and doubts.
Segullah: That sounds shattering. How did you navigate those realities?
Sue: I found solace in several things, including spending many hours at the Malibu Lagoon tide pools.
Segullah: Malibu Lagoon tide pools? Tell us about that!
Sue: I happened upon the lagoon one day at a very low tide. This was about 1992. I knew nothing about tides or tide pools. I started looking around, and what I found was magical –anemones, shells, sea stars, an unbelievable diversity of seaweed! I became adept at reading tide charts and went back over and over again. I bought knee-high rubber boots so I could get as far from shore as possible. The best daytime low tides in California are during the winter, so actually getting in the water was not an appealing idea.
All my depressive thoughts would disappear during those hours as I looked closely in wonder. Really closely.
Magical things started to happen…like a small octopus crawled up on a rock next to the one I was sitting on and stayed there, keeping me company for many minutes.
Segullah: That does sound magical! Healing through nature – without having all 8 arms around you to console you.
Sue: I moved away from California 24 years ago, but I still try to get back to the tide pools once a year. Same with the redwoods in Northern California. All the cliches are true about their majesty, old-soul feeling, and stunning beauty. I find the earthy aromas and the quiet in redwood groves otherworldly. The almost noiseless sound of people’s feet on the needle-padded trails is soothing. I’ve found several old giant sequoias in Utah Valley, where I live now (sequoias and redwoods are closely related), and I visit them often. I planted a dwarf version in my yard a few years ago. The healing power of nature converted me for life.
Segullah: You’re sharing that gift with all of us.
Sue: I’ve found direct connection to God challenging, so in later life I’m connecting to the divinity within my own body by using my five mortal senses, which for me combine in a beautiful alchemy to create my spiritual life. Awe and wonder are available to me anytime, anywhere.
Segullah: Your nature assemblages resonate for me so powerfully – without words or explanation. To me they are both joyful and holy. I find them so magical and compelling. Given my mood when I look at them I can find consolation, blatant joyfulness, tenderness, irony. The list goes on.
Sue: Thank you so much for saying that, Linda. I began to be interested in both nature flatlays and cyanotype art about the same time three years ago when I noticed these two art forms on Instagram.
Segullah: Can you define those terms for us?
Sue: Nature flatlays are two-dimensional arrangements of nature elements (leaves, seeds, pods, shells) on a substrate like the ground or tabletop. Cyanotypes are botanical “photographs” made by coating paper with a specific chemical, laying objects on top, and exposing the paper to the sun. The objects block the sunlight, and the sun develops the chemical, creating an outline of the objects and details like the veins in a leaf if the sunlight can penetrate to one degree or another.
I thought these two art processes were something I could get good at as a late-life artist without drawing skills. For many years, I had already been developing my sense of wonder and picking up leaves and pods from the ground on walks.
Segullah: When did this sense of wonder first capture your attention?
Sue: Starting about 18 years ago, I was particularly interested in “miniaturizing” my sense of wonder on behalf of my hospice patients. I was a full-time hospice chaplain in Salt Lake and Utah Counties from 2007 to 2017.
Many of my patients were bedbound, bored, and feeling “useless.” I encouraged them to miniaturize their sense of wonder (not my phrase, but I can’t remember where I first read it). For those who seemed interested, I would help them get a bird feeder set up outside their window or bring little bowls of pretty leaves, pods, and seeds (especially in the fall, of course).
My first nature piece was actually a sculpture using the long skinny pods from a catalpa tree that I found on a walk. Inspired by what I had seen on Instagram, I began looking more closely at the ground for things I could pick up and use in an artistic way, not just stick in a bowl on my coffee table.
With ephemeral art, which nature flatlays generally are, the photograph is important because it is the only lasting version of the art. This first piece was crude but fun! The pods are set on a doormat with some tooth (texture) so I could get the pods to stand up.
A couple of days later, I decided to try a sculpture with the bark from a London plane tree. I had a lousy cell phone camera and could not create a satisfying photo until I built a little black box so the background was neutral. I shared the resulting photo on Facebook and got encouraging reactions, which motivated me to make more nature art. The sculpture approach was difficult and I decided to stick with flatlays.
Segullah: Practicality for the win! What can you tell us about creating flatlays?
Sue: The beauty of the flatlay practice is that it does not take a long time per piece (10 minutes at least and up to an hour or two at most, generally speaking). I get a lot of satisfaction from that relatively small investment of time.
I show almost everything I make on Facebook and Instagram, even if I think it’s not particularly good. I enjoy the reactions and love it when I get comments or private messages that tell me a person is looking more closely at the natural world and enjoying it more because of my influence.
Just after Christmas (2023), a gentleman messaged me along with a photo that showed a beautiful flatlay he had created for his wife’s Christmas gift, inspired by what he had seen me create. That melted me to my core.
Segullah: So – your practice is contagious!
Sue: Other than my daily practice of nature flatlays, I have also created hundreds of cyanotype sunprints and have sold many of them. I’m beginning to create mixed media pieces with cyanotypes. Below is a mixed media piece. This particular one is sold.
Segullah: How do you create cyanotypes?
Sue: Over the last three years, I have grown greatly in my ability to create compositions that are pleasing and show off the natural elements I choose for each piece. I make the flatlays daily in streaks– I’m in quite a long-running streak right now, but sometimes I’ll let it go for days or weeks at a time until I feel relaxed about it again and not pressured to keep up a streak. I want to enjoy making art, not feel pressured to do it.
Segullah: That sounds sublimely healthy. Amen, sister!
Thank you so much for sharing your talents and perspectives with our Segullah readers and with the world. Thank you for loving, strengthening, consoling, and surprising all of us with your talents and perspectives.
You can find Sue on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/sueberginart
So well done, Linda! Thank you for sharing Sue with us.
Sue is my niece, and she has always been a powerhouse of talent, inquisitiveness, fortitude, empathy, and intelligence. Her art is just another venue for her to share herself with the world. I am always in awe of her.