Heidi Bucher’s distinctive practice fused sculpture and performance. She focussed on key themes within her oeuvre, such as water, fashion and textiles, domesticity, and architecture, particularly psychologically inhabited interior spaces which both had a connection to her own ancestry or that might possess a form of communally experienced trauma. Like few other artists of her generation, Bucher pointed out how strongly the human body remains bound up with architectonic reality, and how memories, obsessions and dreams are materialised in the surface of interior spaces.
Her works included small wrapped objects, sculptural costumes, and architectural 'skinnings' of windows, doors and sometimes entire rooms. The intensely physical process of making these latter works involved embalming rooms and façades through the hand application of latex and pigments. Following this laborious process, Bucher would ‘skin’ the rooms, slowly stripping off the leathery surfaces.
Bucher’s caoutchouc and latex work is reminiscent of the periodic shedding of the snake’s skin or the metamorphosis of butterflies and dragonflies, symbols that Bucher frequently employed. She further emphasised the association between her works and insects through her use of iridescent mother of pearl pigment. To the artist, these works represented moments of transformation and renewal and the detachment from the conventions and constraints of the past, as opposed to trauma or loss. Bucher said about the working process, ‘we cover and discover’.
Heidi Bucher b. 1926, Winterthur, Switzerland; d. 1993 Brunnen, Switzerland