About

Suze Agnes, also known as Suus, is an author, artist, and illustrator. Her ink drawings and paintings use plant pigments and watercolours as the basis of her observations, emotions, and dreams of living beings, especially small organisms. 

Starting from seeds and cuttings, plant materials are collected in her surroundings in rural France or grown in her garden, and transformed into inks and pigments in her garage laboratory, mixed with other materials, like salt and iron.

Through small life-giving acts, she grows lifeworlds in her drawings and words, telling stories of life and death. The intimate views of the interconnected world at ground level express a liveliness in places that are often overlooked or unloved, and the potential for company on even the smallest piece of earth. It is here where she finds possibilities for a fellow feeling for plants, insects, mushrooms, frogs, lichens, and slime moulds, and a knowledge of the intermingling of micro and macro lives — between an insect and herself, a mushroom and a fly, a flower and the earth.

My work is paper-based, and explores the combination of images and words in various forms: zines, comics and other forms of visual narratives, illustrations, paintings, and poetry. These have been showcased in diverse places, including zine & comics festivals, galleries, museums, journals, and online platforms - first in New Zealand, then internationally. The central theme in my work is the relationship between humans and nature.

I am a tumbleweed, blowing around and picking up bits and pieces encountered on my way. I swims in aquatic melodies, sings with insects, grow flowers, and creatures have been pouring out of me for some time now. 

I like to venture to the barely imaginable, to where things become clouded,
and hold them for a while — give them a spin.

I am interested in the joys and difficulties of sharing spaces with other creatures. Different knowledges colour my perceptions: folklore, ancient narratives, contemporary ecological knowledges, and sensory experiences fuel the imagination. A mix of curiosity and endless not-knowing leads me to playful views on the place of humans interwoven with all the other creatures.

Nature is not a backdrop to human life. There is a place for laughter and awe amidst the disgust. There is growth with the rot. A spark of imagination through an unexpected encounter. Small creatures are a lot more intelligent, sensitive, and flexible than usually given credit for. Entangled and often ironic, we must keep finding arrangements for living together. Mixing play and the serious, I wish to contribute to a broader recognition of creatures in all shapes and sizes, not just for their ecological importance, but also as lively, aware, full of story, and for whom things matter. 

I love expressions that combine painting, poetry, and/or natural history as if they never needed to be separated.

The uncomfortable, the wondrous, the underdog.  Then there are dreams, odd observations, the beauty in the mundane, and life’s strangeness.