Susanna Bauer uses what is small and fragile to express what is universal and enduring in our coexistence with each other and the natural world.
In this collection of powerfully delicate work, she responds to the ephemeral beauty of fallen leaves, fragile seeds and slender, twisting branches with an intense material devotion.
In a uniquely conceived approach to craft, Bauer works with the everyday, inconspicuous details of our natural surroundings, skilfully embroidering found magnolia leaves with a halo of cotton thread and coaxing others into finely constructed three-dimensional shapes. Her work draws out from each tiny object its own unique story of creation, existence and belonging in a way that mirrors our own exceptional path through life. Within the sacred and familial privacy of white box frames, curled leaves lie closely together in affectionate intimacy, branches reach tenderly for one another, held fast by a web of crocheted thread, while pairs of rounded leaves merge seamlessly together in perfect, tranquil unity. In gently expressive pieces like Aura, Bauer’s intricate embellishments enhance the vita colour, shape and character of a tiny natural entity we might otherwise overlook. In subtly conceived, single-leafed works such as Dwelling, ideas of scale are reversed and our own arbitrary relationship to the world around us is brought into question. In larger, bolder pieces like Woodland, Bauer gives voice to nature’s otherwise mute but wholly unique creations: by bring together individual leaves from the same living tree, her work suggests and celebrates ideas of uniqueness, diversity, family and community.
With a focus on mutuality, material and form, Bauer’s exquisite and highly original work illuminates the secret and wholly precious nature of our world, ourselves, and things seemingly in infinite abundance.
Mercedes Smith
Susanna Bauer’s intense focus
Susanna Bauer is an artist who explores craft techniques in unconventional ways. She embellishes leaves with thread and crochets around rocks and twigs. In addition, Bauer has created a group of diminutive weavings as well as elegant paintings, drawings and collages. Her delicate work is highly personal, influenced more by an internal need than formal academic training.
While many artists today are trying to push the boundaries of craft in bold and monumental ways, Bauer takes another approach. This quote from her website defines her orientation: ‘I like giving time to the inconspicuous things that surround us and often go unnoticed, paying attention to small details and the tactile quality of objects.’
Bauer’s focus is intense, particularly when she is working with threads and leaves. Her art is considered and deliberate, suggesting a concentration akin to meditation. Although small in scale, each transformed leaf becomes an engaging miniature sculpture. It is hard to look at these pieces and not be mesmerized. The idea that something so small, fragile and insignificant as a leaf becomes the foundation of a sculpture challenges expectations and holds the viewer’s attention.
The leaf works are powerful examples of the interface between artist and nature. Many artists are inspired by nature and attempt to imitate what they see in the natural world.
Bauer, on the other hand, includes natural elements into her work as if she is actually collaborating with nature. In these pieces, the leaf is not simply a surface to work on or a piece of raw material to be used at will. For Bauer, the leaf is an element deserving respect and consideration. What she adds to it, or subtracts from it, is done with a sense of reverence. Her efforts enhance the natural beauty that was her starting point.
When Bauer crochets around rocks, she fabricates sculptures that are the polar opposite of her transformed leaves. While leaves are excessively fragile objects, rocks are nearly indestructible. In a nuanced manner Bauer creates a new skin for the rocks, transforming the object. Many of these sculptures are variations of each other, different only by subtle colors of the threads used to encase the rocks.
Most of the sculptures are crocheted in such a way that a small hole is left at the top or on the side of each rock. It is as if Bauer is creating a window that exposes one small remarkable detail. Often a graceful line cuts across the exposed area. In these works, Bauer’s asks us to consider the simplest element on the simplest of forms, creating an experience similar to looking at a beautiful slide under a powerful microscope.
It is not surprising that an artist who is attracted to leaves and rocks would also see potential in broken twigs. Bauer simply refers to this body of work as Wood. These pieces are small in scale, graceful and intimate. Some of the wood sculptures are embellished and resurfaced with thread. In a few cases, Bauer uses these twigs as a loom, weaving a spider-web of thread on a Y shaped piece of wood.
Whether using rocks, leaves or twigs, Susanna Bauer shares her experience as a profoundly focused observer of nature. She notices what others often overlook and transforms what she sees into art. She gives us something that is exceptionally personal while at the same time universal.
Scott Rothstein, HandEye Magazine
Agog at Small Things
Andy Christian admires an artist who makes the invisible visible.

As a small child in her native Germany, Susanna Bauer was taught to crochet; but she was not interested in making the usual blankets and covers, but rather in making tiny items in fine cotton thread. They mirrored the matchbox-sized world that fascinated her. She grew up in the Bavarian countryside, where she could further explore the small things that most adults simply pass by unseeing. Her acute observation and her appreciation of the miniature along with her craft skills led her into a career in model making. She made props for the film industry, for advertising and for animations. That career was largely city-based and made her restless for time to spend closer to Nature once again.
Before Bauer moved to Cornwall permanently, on her short escapes from London she began to crochet once more and to combine that work with found objects. In the most subtle of her interventions on pieces of wood she added outcrops of crochet like a dome of mould or an unusual fungus. These are easily missed by casual viewers. In other works, two leaf forms are linked by tenacious threads as if some strangely ordered spider had left an unyielding net. We are rewarded by the wondrous only if we take the time to sharpen our eyes to her world. A combination of fine craft skill, a concern for small things and collecting found objects has made up her vocabulary.
More recently, Bauer discovered magnolia leaves. Magnolias are ancient trees and some fossil forms of them may date back nearly 60 million years. They preceded bees, so they rely on beetles to pollinate them. Bauer’s primary interest has been in their leaves. She has homed-in on one particular tree and collects some of the leaves it sheds throughout the year. These fleshy leaves are robust and they have a wide range of sizes and a broad palette of colour, depending on when they fall. Some are scarred by weather or by insects. Others have their fine veins exposed but clinging to their more substantial skeletons. Bauer collects and selects them and then they people her studio awaiting further consideration for transformation.
Whether Bauer cuts and realigns, patches holes or makes three-dimensional forms from the leaves, the attuned viewer will become aware of the extraordinary nature of the acute vision and dexterous fingers that enable her to put these works together. The crochet is visible and it is stitched through leaves that must be quite brittle and prone to tearing. Bauer has become sensitive to the qualities of each leaf and to what each might allow her to add to or to manufacture with it. But the crafting is so subtle that it does not call attention primarily to itself: it always remains the means to the making of the overall work. The combinations of leaf and thread, wood and thread, thread and stone are the source of her metaphors.
Bauer seems understandably shy and unwilling to try to elucidate or decode the allusions in her work. It is as if she sees her role as making visible the invisible. If she were to try to write down meanings it would nail the work and not allow its focus to shift for each viewer. Our attention is called to something we may not have considered or begun to understand. In a very simple way, we can consider each magnolia leaf as a person. Each certainly has a personality. Each bears the scars and traces of its life and each echoes its small part of that larger body, the root and branch of the whole tree and a seasonal life in the world. Indeed, we might begin to imagine the whole world in the single leaf of a magnolia tree.
Bauer has begun to work with small branches in combination with leaves. Some of the leaves are stitched into place and others are curled into cones like lone wasps’ nests. The branches have all the vigour of sprightly, drawn lines and they are selected to dance with one another in white box frames. This gives them a curious status, as if they had been collected as specimens by an eager naturalist. This contextualisation helps viewers to focus and maybe to afford closer examination. Around her studio sit pieces of beachcombed detritus, lines of leaves queuing for her consideration, a huddle of twisting sticks and empty boxes awaiting inhabitants. It is a place where the humblest materials will find the nimblest of fingers to join them together in ways that can provoke and awaken us.
This is an extract from Resurgence & Ecologist issue 286 (September/ October 2014). To read this and further articles or find out about The Resurgence Trust, visit: http://www.resurgence.org