Susanna Bauer was born in Eichstätt, Germany in 1969 and was raised in the countryside, where she developed a passion for nature and the land. She studied Landscape Architecture at the Technische Universität in Munich and during that time she also worked at the Jardin des Plantes botanical gardens in Montpellier, France. She went on to become a modelmaker and spent two decades working in film and television. From 2007 to 2008 she studied at Camberwell College of Art and began to combine her love of nature with her finely tuned technical skills, laying the foundation for her future art practice. Susanna has exhibited in the UK, USA, Sweden, Italy, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and India.
“I work with natural leaves and crochet, creating an intimate dialog with nature. Found leaves are repaired, embellished and combined using handmade lace crochet – a laborious traditional technique relying on tension, set in direct relationship to the fragile natural material. The resulting forms are a meditation on the beauty and intricacy found in the natural world and a reflection of complex and tender relationships both within ourselves and our environment. There is a fine balance in my work between fragility and strength; literally, when it comes to pulling a fine thread through a brittle leaf or thin dry piece of wood, but also in a wider context - the tenderness and tension in human connections, the transient yet enduring beauty of nature that can be found in the smallest detail, vulnerability and resilience that could be transferred to nature as a whole or the stories of individual beings”.