Artists

Stéphanie Baechler

Press release

‘Cloths persist as records of the processes which fed into their production: how many women worked on them, the techniques they used, the skills they employed. The visible pattern is integral to the process which produced it; the program and the pattern are continuous.’ – Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones (1997)

Sadie Plant writes that ‘holes are never simply absences’, a sentiment that Stéphanie Baechler takes as her mantra. In this exhibition Zeros + Ones—the title borrowed from Plant’s 1997 book of the same name—Baechler presents a collage of textile, photography, video, and printed works that insist wholly on presence. From addressing the holes of the traditional punch card to the holes in our collective cultural memory, the works in this exhibition present gaps as spaces that persist, totally alive with materiality, visibility, and remembrance. In the summer of 2024, Baechler unveiled Forget Me Not, a large-scale public artwork installed at the architecturally monumental Tröckneturm in St. Gallen, CH. The Tröckneturm—or drying tower—was historically used to hang wet, dyed fabrics out to dry before being cut and sold. Lengths of heavy fabric would be hung from the top of the tower, dappling the dark wood of the structure with reams of freshly dyed red linen. Though we might typically think of designing or dyeing as key elements of textile production, the equally crucial drying stage is commonly overlooked. Similarly, these once-functional towers, now defunct, are also often overlooked, no longer beacons of industry but old diminishing posts dotting the Swiss horizon.
For the installation, the artist hung panels of hi-tech fabric from the tower in a bid to reanimate it, reminding us of the structure’s historic use, of the forgotten drying process, and of the human toil behind textile production. Baechler laser cut holes in these panels to render them giant punch cards, the pattern of which is a direct copy of the pattern used to embroider forget-me-not flowers onto traditional Swiss handkerchiefs. Named after this motif, the installation Forget Me Not beckons the forgotten structure and its history back into our line of sight.