Sharp Statement

March 28, 2025

Kansas City artist Susan White gets to the point literally, philosophically and spiritually, using locust thorns as her medium.

Words by Susan Cannon | Photos by E.G. Schempf

“I believe that there is a kind of spirituality throughout the world that connects all of us across time, across cultures, and that it is deeply manifest in nature,” artist Susan White explains. This belief has a poetic ring to it, and her works seem to carry a common sensibility of lyricism, whether they are representative of hope or forlornness.

In 2010, White was an artist in residence at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo, and her experiences influenced her work in myriad ways.

“My time in Japan caused me to think carefully about air, about breathing, about osmosis, a kind of unconscious assimilation or gathering of information through the atmosphere,” she says.

She has also said: “Walking is a significant part of my way of being—a means of observing, of thinking.”

Her body of work indeed reflects these connections to nature.

Most recently, White has been working in two predominant mediums. First, mesmerizing pyrography artworks created through a scorching or burning process on paper. With the tiny tip of a burn tool, the artist’s pyrography pieces are intricately born by making millions of tiny burn marks.

“I’m interested in transforming the frenetic impulse of the everyday into a calming, meditative hum,” she says, explaining not only the visual expression of the works, but also the actual rhythm she feels when working on these pieces. She sees these works as a meditation on topography, expressive of air, of breathing, of atmosphere suggestive of deep space as well as a kind of molecular intimacy.

“They are informed by the great prairies of the Midwest, vast acres burned every spring to restore nitrogen to the soil—a fertility ritual in a way—and by the undulating horizon lines of the Flint Hills beneath which is limestone,” she says.

Second are the artist’s thorn sculptures. White’s thorn works are large-scale installations and discrete sculptures related to architectural form.

“They are dangerous and much defiled and difficult to work with, yet I respond to their elegance of form and the cultural metaphors they suggest,” White notes.

The artist’s first and largest thorn sculpture she made is the 17-foot artwork, Rift, that resides in a private collection in Loch Lloyd. The suspended sculptures are created around a central chain.

“I make a hole through which the natural thorns are self-doweled. It is a slow and meditative process,” she explains. However, one suspended thorn sculpture called Hope Line has no interior chain. “Hope is fragile,” White comments about this particular work, painted in gold, one thorn at a time.

White’s seminal body of using thorns, however, has been a series of American Thorn Flags she began in 2012. Flag I represented a complete flag at Cara y Cabezas Gallery, and Flag II, shown at Haw Contemporary Gallery in 2014, was a partial flag with some of the thorns having fallen to the floor, when she felt the country to be in a growing state of disarray and distress. Through the subsequent years, her series of American flags became expressive of the magnitude of conflict and dissension within America, where each of the six appeared in further decay. In her latest exhibition at Studios Inc. in September 2024, Flag VI was disassembled into three separate piles of thorns. At that time, she felt everything had fallen apart, yet some hope remained.

While there is a line of “hope” through White’s various works, she has concluded that Flag VI, the disassembled flag, will be the final of the series.