Heidi Bucher

The artist Heidi Bucher often worked with soft and malleable materials. She used gauze and liquid latex, for example, to perform so-called “skinnings” of rooms and spaces such as the gentleman’s study in her parents’ house in the Wülflingen district of the Swiss town of Winterthur. Bucher became internationally known for these large-scale reliefs whose creation required enormous effort and was occasionally documented as a performance. With these works, she created art installations that preserved the traces of time and of a house’s inhabitants and mirrored family and social constellations.

In addition, Bucher was an excellent draftswoman and well-versed in different techniques, from ink and watercolor to pencil. By using frottage (rubbing), she resorted to a graphic process that bore resemblance to her latex works. In frottage, the surface structure of objects and/or materials is transferred onto a sheet of paper placed on top of the object by rubbing chalk or pencil over the paper.

The work St. Paul de Vence (1978) shows the “rubbing” of two scarves featuring trims and floral embroidery, as well as the sleeves of one or several blouses with elastic wrist bands. Thanks to the selection and design of the textiles as well as the appliqué embroidery, the ruffled details and full trims, and not least the drape of the blouse, the artist managed to create an attractive, richly varied composition.

Through frottage, the folds of the fabrics transmute into a delicate configuration of lines that structures the sheet just as much as the regular patterning of the trims. Together, they form an intricate network of lines enlivened by delicate floral motifs, with the application of glittering mother-of-pearl giving the work a final, special luster.

Heidi Bucher worked with textiles all her life. For her, pieces of clothing were carriers of lived experience, but also surrogates of bodies, a material expression of memories and social conventions, and a means to express one’s own personality. With the aid of frottage, she transposed clothes and fabrics into a graphic form, thus giving them new meaning.

Her interest in a sensory engagement with objects of everyday use reveal a kinship with the works of Claude Heath.