“I go walking. I find a leaf, a piece of driftwood – or sometimes it finds me. I take it home, and its new life begins.”

So writes Susanna Bauer – a German-born artist who lives in Cornwall, England – on her website. Trained as a model-maker for the advertising and film industries, Bauer has crafted giant chocolate bars and cameras, miniature pyramids for the movie 10,000 BC, and scaled-down battleships for The Patriot. Now focused on her own meticulous work, she favors the materials she encounters in the woods and on the beaches near her house. “I find myself recharging with the quiet concentration, the time, and the calmness that goes into my leaf and wood  pieces,” she says. She gives leaves, wood, and stones their due by embellishing them with weaving or crochet, in her own celebration of nature.