As I leave artist Lorna Bauer’s house after my visit to her home studio, our third meeting, she gives me a hug and wishes me luck on an upcoming move. We make plans for a drink on her back porch, “once things start to bloom.” Walking away I make notes on my phone about the visit. Patricia’s garden upstate. Daffodils, hydrangea, magnolia. Grouse like a dirt bike. Adair’s drawings. Pollinators. States of transformation. 

Like glass in its molten state. Like the latent image on film as developer meets fixer meets water meets heat. Like a flowering tree in April in Montréal. 

It's been only a few weeks since we first met. Although I’ve been following Bauer’s work for some time and we both live in Montréal, our paths hadn’t crossed before this profile. We meet in March, on what was the warmest day of the year so far—though it’s since been surpassed many times, thank god. An ugly, garbage-decked, rhapsodic Tuesday in late winter. I walk across a few neighbourhoods from my home to meet Bauer at one of Montréal’s big studio buildings, working up a seasonally-unlikely sweat, caught up in an impression of being passed on all sides by runners made quick by their freedom from specialty winter gear. Bikes are sending arcs of brown water into the air. We’re all immersed in the feeling of movement with a loosened grip. 

Bauer meets me in the lobby. She is immediately telling me about the state of the work in progress, how lovely everyone at the artist-run centre, Centre CLARK has been during her brief interlude in their studio, and how this body of work came to be. She slept badly the night before, she says, and it makes her talkative. That’s great for me, since my goal is to get to know her. My first impression is of someone who loves a good story, and tells them well. 

Bauer knew at 14 she wanted to be an artist, she tells me: at a Cindy Sherman show in Toronto with friends she was visited by the realization of this desire, and nothing since has displaced or overshadowed it. She works all the time, and like many artists, her relationship to both the public nature of this work and to its material evidence, in her studio, in museum or private collections, in exhibition or in storage, is fraught. One of few bodies of work she currently considers with satisfaction are the large floor sculptures, glass blown into wire basket forms, which feature in exhibitions of the last several years. These she still enjoys—she took her time with them, she says, and allowed for their simplicity. “Maybe I should do that more,” she adds. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The way Bauer talks about her work is notably unassuming, given she’s in the midst of a thriving career. It’s no false modesty, just honest description of how she feels about work that is always iterating. Bauer is a photographer and sculptor, with international exhibition credits, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Darling Foundry (Montréal), Franz Kaka (Toronto), Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery (Athens), and Arsenal Contemporary (New York). She’s been an artist-in-residence in Rio de Janeiro, Paris, New York, Banff, and Florida, and among recent accolades, she was a finalist for the prestigious Canadian Sobey Art Award and received the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award for contemporary Canadian photography. She teaches, writes, and curates. For a few years she operated the project space L’escalier in Montréal, an apartment gallery run collaboratively with Jon Knowles, who is Bauer’s partner, and Vincent Bonin, a close collaborator and friend, who has himself written extensively on Bauer’s practice over the years. Many artists teach, as Bauer does, but she has also by her own description been studying for most of her career. When she sets out to develop a project, if it demands a skill she doesn’t have yet she’ll enroll in a class, or reach out to a technician, or start visiting a workshop. She’ll spend months or years working to produce a form, texture, or image that hews as closely to the project’s vision as she can make it. 

On the morning we meet she’s in a studio normally in use for residents with artist-run centre CLARK, in order to finish several works before they’re shipped on the coming Friday. She needs the space and access to framing and a few other specialty services, and this is easier than moving the pieces back and forth through their final stages. Transportation is often a headache for artists, but this work presents a particular challenge: five big slabs of glass each roughly 22 x 36”, with smaller glass parts glued delicately into alcoves on their surface. Once glued these glass parts have to sit untouched for 2-3 days. Bauer has been working with glass for at least ten years. People get nervous around glass, she says, and it's often a challenge to convince institutions to work with her on projects that involve long-distance transportation. Anxiety runs high in installs. But the glass she’s working with for this project is actually quite strong—scientific glass, the kind used to make beakers. This has a connection with the origins of the work, a characteristic attention to detail and investment in material history.

This studio is on the 6th floor, southeast facing windows flooded with high noon light. The five works being finished here are flat on tables, although they’ll be hung when installed. In the light they look almost liquid. As we walk between them during our conversation the light changes quickly, and each time I look at their surfaces again they seem changed, colour-corrected, sometimes a bright, cool yellow, sometimes a murky green, layers impossible to disintegrate with one’s eyes. Bauer is still getting acquainted with these; they came out of the kiln a couple weeks earlier and were then mirrored by hand. The slabs were slumped on plaster silica molds (made from clay) in the kiln, a process for forming glass to a specific shape but one without strict guarantees. These are more idiosyncratic than she expected. They undulate, basically flat but warbled across their surface by the irregularities of the mold beneath, and in a few places shallow basins have been made for the glass objects and photographs that are the final steps for the work. Sitting alongside are the delicate, sandblasted forms waiting to be glued. Bauer also shows me some of the photographs, culled from her extensive collection, that she considered for these pieces. Each of the five works gently references a hinge point in the history that inspires them. 

Snail, orchid, ginko leaf, stamen, glass eye, vertebrae. The photos and delicate inset objects on these works refer to a set of people and places associated with The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, better known as the “Glass Flowers" collection at Harvard. The collection is of works made by Dresden-based Czech glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father and son team who between 1886 and 1936 produced 4,300 glass models representing 780 plant species. Bauer has family in Massachusetts and has been trying to visit the collection for years now. Finally, last summer, she did, and began developing new works soon after in response. The history of glassmaking is one of oral tradition, she tells me. Great glassblowers and flameworkers often begin learning as young children, as was the case with the Blaschka family: Leopold’s father made jewelry, and Rudolph was in the workshop from as young as seven. Bauer tells me all of this easily and quickly. She’s been immersed in this family’s world all year as she developed the project, and it's clearly waiting for the telling. Four of these glass works will join another four similar and some of her floor-sitting sculptures, also made with glass, for a show in Dresden titled Lotte.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was the possibility of this show that convinced Bauer to make the Blaschkas her central subjects, although she was already fascinated by their glass works. On her phone she shows me the photo she took on July 24th, 2024, of an infographic at the Ware collection titled “Rudolf’s ‘Lotte.’” Beside the infographic is a small, preserved snail shell. In the exhibition text for Lotte, curator Marie-Charlotte Carrier (who Bauer has worked with for many years) describes how Rudolf’s pet snail Lotte was “lovingly tended by the Blaschkas in their Dresden garden.” Lotte’s apparition in the show is as a photo by Bauer of a snail as it “climbs up the stem of wild flowers towards a veil of chemical residue, made visible through the artist’s use of an expired black-and-white Polaroid film.” Film photography and glass are not divergent interests in Bauer’s work, and the pieces in Lotte are a great example of this. For her, they connect both formally and conceptually. One way is via silver nitrate, which is a light-sensitive substance used in processing photos, as well as the chemical used to transform glass into mirrored surface. And, I learn from Carrier, Bauer’s process makes use of techniques once common in the production of 19th-century greenhouse windows. This history of glass processing predates, and prefigures, those later used in photography. 

Bauer’s interest in material history is that of both storyteller and technician. I noticed this, the work sometimes seems to say, and became like it; a memorializing impulse, I think at first. Later, having spent more time in conversation with Bauer, and with the work, I decide that memorializing isn’t the right word. As an artist, Bauer is drawn to specific sites but often discovers them circuitously. What interests you about modernism? I ask, based on the modernist architects and designers who show up in her work. It’s not so much that she’s interested in them, Bauer says, as she has found herself caught up in several histories in which specific modernists feature. Like the abandoned home of Arthur C. Erickson in Ottawa, which Bonin first told her about, and that led her to another of Erickson’s homes in Vancouver. Bauer often develops the form of the work in reference to the disciplinary methods of its subjects, but it’s more conversational than mimetic. How does a botanist develop their schema for cataloguing various plants? How does a site appear through the window of a plane, or the window of a house, and how does it look seen from a boat just offshore? What distinguishes a window from a mirror and an entrance from an opening? How does a sheet of film receive and cohere with its image via long-lingering chemical intervention? 

The work snakes a path between makers, their objects, and their audiences, at many scales, often beginning with a specific site or figure (designers, architects, scientists, theorists, their sites of work or invention) and develops through an extended, dense investigation of the things, places, and ideas they lead her to. She follows her interest in a way she at first describes to me as irregular, even improper, nothing as systematic as “research.” But when she clarifies the state of mind she’s describing, it seems symphonic more than anything. Many things at once, in concert or not, their simultaneity or proximity the key to a particular cartographic order. In the thick of a project it’s like there’s a screen always before her perception, something she can’t remove, and almost everything she encounters gets drawn through its mesh, considered for any spark of recognition or relation. 

This observational density shows up in the work. Her photos are often layers of competing reflections: interiors obscured by the material meant to bare them to our sight (glass, mesh), gardens seen as a refraction of plant, chair, wall, and figure, monuments or murals scrambled by Bauer’s view. These confusions of flesh and skin, facade and interior, make their way across media. A collected account of Bauer’s subject matter has its own almost orchestral force: “the Paris city plan, in particular the arcades and the underground mushroom cultivation in the Parisian catacombs” “Haussmannization” “North American west coast utopian gardens from the nineteen sixties” “Walter Benjamin’s letters to his lover, describing the Island of Ibiza, while in exile” “the Jardin des Plantes” including “greenhouses, a botanical library and school, labyrinth and small Ménagerie,” “Rudolf’s garden.” 

 

 

 

 

 

Bauer’s work maintains its clear enthrallment with the brutality and ecstasy of natural transformations, while slyly proposing that we read these sites, catalogues, archives, for the particular historical complicities they seem to obscure

 

 

 

 

 

In a 2018 show Tools for Idlers (her third solo show at Galerie Nicolas Robert, who represent her), she took the Sítio as her subject, the Rio de Janeiro home and garden of late Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. The site was also privy to his collaboration with British botanist Margaret Mee. Like in many of her projects, Bauer presents several parallel accounts in these photographs: the place itself, her own idiosyncratic encounter with it, and the evidence of her engagement with methods that appear or come under contested dialogue in the works of Marx and Mee. Implicit to many of Bauer’s sites of interest are the extractivist logics of colonial archiving and cataloguing efforts, but often, she turns her gaze on a character who interpolates the site in some way, or whose presence disfigures any attempt at a unified picture. Invention requires the purposing of material towards its own disappearance. In Bauer’s production of an image, in Mee's efforts to collect and document Amazonian plant specimens, in the conservationist fantasies of Marx’s landscape designs, any representation is also an erosion. There’s no simple gesture available to someone who grasps at a thing in order to resist its endangerment. There is no botany, as we know it, without empire. Like film, which represents its own death on its surface, there is no catalogue without diminishment. Bauer’s work maintains its clear enthrallment with the brutality and ecstasy of natural transformations, while slyly proposing that we read these sites, catalogues, archives, for the particular historical complicities they seem to obscure—represented in Bauer’s refusal to let the work appear simply as documentation. Her interest in a major modernist figure like Le Corbusier, for example, is via the historical impurity that some apparently more minor character in the margins of his narrative clarifies. My favourite example of this in Bauer’s work is still in-progress. 

For at least seven years Bauer has been making work about a house designed by Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Gray in 1929: E-1027, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The project, for Bauer, began with one of Gray’s mirror designs, and she hopes it will finally be shown later this year. Visiting her home studio I get to see a handful of the 18 wall sculptures that belong to this body of work. Bauer tells me a bit about what she calls the house’s “sordid history” during our lunch meeting, and later I look it up. By the time I visit Bauer’s home studio I’ve inherited the Eileen Gray obsession. “I’ve been deep in the rabbit hole,” I tell her, and Bauer nods knowingly. “I can’t believe Le Corbusier drowned there!” “I know. And the boating accident? And the murders?”

Gray’s house was a favourite spot of Le Corbusier’s. Fascists, it turns out, love a holiday home. Le Corbusier began visiting after Gray split up with Romanian architect Jean Badovici and ceded the home (which they designed collaboratively) to him. Against Gray’s explicit wishes, Le Corbusier painted 8 murals across interior and exterior walls of the house, and until recently Gray’s own work as the designer was significantly overshadowed by the presence of these murals at the site. In 1978 Le Corbusier drowned swimming off the beach below E-1027, only one in a string of deaths and scandals associated with the area. As far as I know these dramas won’t show up explicitly in Bauer’s work, but the ambivalence of the history is not irrelevant. Although Bauer tends to work that is lush and prepossessing, she is not interested in subjects (or in processes) for nostalgic reasons. This is not a fetish for the modern, because Bauer’s interest in the site is not in the supposed sublime of Le Corbusier’s works, or even in remedial attention for Gray’s design innovations. But it’s not strictly critical, either. It’s more like a vested interest in whatever of the scene refers to its defacement. A mirror, a lamp, and hovering in the psychic background of its glow—out the window, off shore, just out of view—an ominous figure of history splashes in the dark. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our second meeting is on a bright spring day in April. I’d proposed a restaurant close to Bauer’s temporary studio, which we stick to even after deciding to postpone to one week following her use of it. A friend works there and I drop by often, so I know the food is good and that it won’t feel awkward to linger for a few hours. We sit at a small table to the side, at the large windows with a view on the pedestrianized street outside. On the previous Friday she’d shipped the last works for her upcoming show and is enjoying the feeling of work that’s out of her hands. The preparation for this show was unexpectedly grueling, she had told me during our first meeting. It had ballooned into something involving months of study in new glass techniques and long days in the studio alone or with her assistant. 

I’ve prepared a list of questions, but it’s a quiet afternoon for the restaurant and we take our time before I pull them up. Public Parking is paying for our lunch. The novelty of this delights us both, I think, and we each order a few plates to start, discussing whether to share or diversify, saying “we can always order another one later if we want.” It feels, says Bauer at the end of lunch, “old fashioned” and generous to develop a piece of writing this way. I agree, but I think the generosity is as much hers as the publication’s. 

It’s like the way she first introduces me to the work I’d come to see in the studio at centre CLARK. She spends most of the visit telling me about a series of experts with whom she has collaborated for its production. Each person is described in detail: where they were born or grew up, their professional history, a move made for love, their attitude in the studio, impressive resumes, the trajectory of their particular craft expertise. Bauer’s immense respect for these colleagues is clear. They are the best in Quebec, Canada, or the world, in her description. The enthusiasm is catching. Listening to Bauer describe her collaborations I think, should I try flameworking? Should I drive out to the Eastern Townships to visit Pavel, “one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet”? 

Jean-Simon Trottier processes most of the mirrored glass in her work. It’s possible to buy a pre-mixed solution for this process, but Trottier has developed his own, signature solution for mirroring glass—a process involving both tin and silver nitrate, washed across the glass to convert it from clear to reflective surface. Jean-Simon is incredibly good at what he does, Bauer tells me. Mixing and developing his own chemicals is an indication of the precision of his work, an astonishing dedication to the specifics of the material that Bauer clearly admires, I suspect because it is a shared impulse between them. Bauer also works with Trottier on smaller blown glass pieces, through Espace VERRE, which (embedded in the Cégep du Vieux Montréal) offers the only college diploma in glass arts in Quebec, and trains most of the expert glass artisans in the province. Probably, Bauer has achieved this degree in spirit if not on paper, after ten years of artistic collaboration with glassblowers at the centre. 

For large glass pieces she works with Pavel Cajthaml, who has several huge kilns in his studio out in the Eastern Townships. Cajthaml, raised in the Czech Republic and practically, in Bauer’s description, born into the craft of glassware, has years of technical experience—having worked at one of the largest glass factories in the Czech Republic, Crystalex, having taught internationally and collaborated with artists now for many decades, while maintaining his own studio practice. Cajthaml is the go-to glass technician for lampware companies across Quebec, and when walking around Montréal Bauer describes constantly encountering his handiwork in the lamp-rich windows of streets like St-Laurent. It’s not only Cajthaml’s expertise that makes their collaboration so rewarding, but his delight in facing a challenge in the studio. Clearly, the delight is shared. 

Over lunch we discover that both of us have a connection to the coastal Massachusetts town of Gloucester. Bauer’s godmother runs a gallery in the town, and she has been visiting for years. It’s Gloucester rather than her hometown of Toronto that Bauer names in response to my question about a favourite or significant place. Gloucester, “the oldest fishing port in the US,” is still a working fishing town, and boasts the Rocky Neck Art Colony, “one of the oldest working art colonies in the US,” located on a granite promontory that separates the Gloucester harbour from Smith’s Cove. I spent four years in a neighbouring town, almost 15 years ago, and would drive to Gloucester often, for breakfast at the Two Sisters or to walk the town’s coastal perimeter. I remember the town in its extremes: intoxicatingly sunny hours looking out over the pungent blue of the harbour, or dark, rainy, fulfilling the moody image of itself found in paintings spanning centuries. Artists associated with it include Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Fitz Henry Lane, Emile Gruppe, Childe Hassam, as well as writers like Louisa May Alcott and Rudyard Kipling. 

It was while visiting Gloucester last year that Bauer went for a first research visit to the Ware Collection, and afterwards began working on Lotte. Carrier, the show’s curator, in an exchange about Bauer for this profile, describes the “quiet intimacy” of Bauer’s work, her “sensitivity to light, reflection, and touch that makes even her most materially rigorous pieces feel very personal.” Carrier says it is “incredible to witness” Bauer develop a project over several years, a “balance between precision and openness” that means early ideas materialize in unexpected but deeply considered ways. Visiting Bauer’s home studio feels like a behind-the-curtain glimpse into the sustained intensity of her approach.

The studio space in the basement is functional and unadorned. Bauer has plans to eventually knock down a wall, expand and brighten the space, but it works for now, though it’s full to the brim with ongoing projects and storage. Some Sítio bottles are crowded onto the shelf. Big boxed works are stacked into the laundry room. In one area there are bioplastics tests for the class on sculpture and sustainability that she teaches to undergrads at Concordia University. Bauer flips through photos she never ended up using of Erickson’s abandoned house in Gatineau. Laughing, she shows me some photo storage that dates back to highschool. She’d recently gone through these, imagining there might be a gem hiding in the depths of her personal archive, but they were all terrible, she says, “there was absolutely nothing.”

 

 

 

 

Upstairs, I ask to see her garden and she walks me to the back door. They built the garden on this small plot of land from scratch. The magnolia has at least tripled in size since they planted it, she says, pointing to it and telling me about a few plans they have for the space. But this garden won’t get as much attention this year, as the focus is on a much larger property she and her partner bought a couple years ago in upstate NY. It was Patricia’s garden until her death, Bauer says, when the cabin and its cultivated acres went on the market. Daffodils, hydrangea, wisteria that has covered huge swaths of the garden and this year will need cutting back. Patricia was an entomologist, and her pollinators’ garden is abundant with unexpected flora and fauna. They bought the place in November, so it wasn’t until the following year that they discovered its true form. Patricia made different decisions than Bauer would, and now they’re caretakers rather than designers, a role she relishes despite its challenges. 

Have I ever encountered grouse? Bauer asks. Last spring she was in the woods with her four year-old kid when they heard what sounded like a dirtbike nearby, and thought it must be a neighbour getting the bikes out for an early season ride. Instead, suddenly a bird, a bit like a pheasant, was facing them, its wings outstretched like some mythical figurehead of a ship. It was the steadily increasing flap of its wings that created this bizarrely motoresque noise. They were mesmerized. Across the low brush they noticed suggestions of movement and afterwards could picture the birds scattered ubiquitously across the woods. She shows me a video of a grouse on her phone to demonstrate. And have I ever heard of something called a bee fly? She finds another video from the garden last year. It looks like a hummingbird, and flies like one too, hovering and darting between flowers. Its odd form provokes a kind of aggravated tenderness. Is this, I wonder, how Rudolf felt about Lotte? 

If much of the pleasure of the garden upstate for Bauer is being given something already in full swing, it seems consistent with her approach to materials in general: she’s willing to be surprised. Standing on the back balcony looking at the still mostly winter-barren plot of her Montréal garden, Bauer makes a characteristic gesture. She starts naming plants, and I’m struck again by the posture so markedly shared between her gardening and her work as an artist. It’s that of a busy patience, eagerly waiting to see evidence of the encounters for which she has carefully prepared the ground.