Stitch by stitch, Susanne Waltermann creates iconographically idiosyncratic works that are as complex as the list of materials used and permeated by a wide variety of thread types. Her own body and its perception play an important role in her artistic practice: ‘I lay the paper on the floor, then lie down on it myself and paint the outline around me.’ In a lengthy, intuitive process, she creates works that are sewn in several layers onto Japanese paper and silk paper. In art history, sewing represents a deeply personal activity; cutting, tearing, sewing and joining are associated with ideas of atonement and the expression of emotional tensions.
The motifs of Waltermann’s votive images range from cooking pots to homeopathic vials, depicting stockings, underpants, fish and sausages. By elevating everyday objects into the sacred realm, the sacred is trivialised and the trivial is simultaneously aestheticised. It is about a search for meaning that could be found neither in an imagery of a blood-drenched saviour nor in the intellectualised Catholicism of Cologne in the 1960s.
Waltermann deals with the existential spiritual foundations of life, which are more easily sensed through images than words, although the medium of language can appear pictorially as sewn words. Susanne Waltermann comments on the tradition of sewing, a craft defined as ‘feminine’ in cultural history, by systematically undermining the implicit imperatives of order, cleanliness and quiet perfection with irregular, coarse stitches and heavy thread.
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