Dear Clay

Dear Clay : Selected as one of the ‘Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2020’, Nominated Best Dutch Books 2021

Dear S,
I have been thinking about my last visit to your studio lately. The one in which you revealed the collection of black sketchbooks you had been keeping for the past decade. I have always been pretty bad at keeping sketchbooks myself despite my love for drawing. This is maybe why I got attracted to those spreads you carefully laid out. While turning the pages, I realized that those books became a tool for you to place past, present and future into a constant dialogue so that each could largely influence on the other. Thinking of time as a linear concept, it seemed like you were interested in the turns, loops, and zigzags rather than the unbent passing of it. The shorthand like pencil scribbles, the snaky clay shapes, the entanglement of threads or the exacerbated curves of a mannequin’s body all became the sinuous signs of a serpentine line that kept on asserting its presence around the small space of your studio.

Stephanie Baechler (1983 CH) is an artst working with textile and creamics.Her work has developped towards sculpture and installation, moving between what she calls hardware (ceramics) and software (textile). She investigates the formal and structural vocabulary of fashion.
‘Dear Clay,’ gathers a selection of spreads extracted from Stéphanie Baechler’s meticulous sketchbooks displayed in chronological order (2013 – 2019), as well as 35mm photographs documenting her working process. Providing an intimate insight into her artistic practice, it reveals what facilitates the work from its conception to its making, transportation, and installation. Rather than presenting it as a final staged object, we see the work as something unpolished, unfinished, in flux.

Author: Stéphanie Baechler
Design: Rudy Guedj & Laura Pappa
Texts by: Stéphanie Baechler, Zoë Dankert, Jan Verwoert, Rudy Guedj
publisher: Rudy Guedj BF (Building Fictions)
240 p, ills colour & bw, 20 x 28 cm,

comes with a embroidered bookmark and an enveloppe, pb, English
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Dear Clay was part of Test Press Books Pop-Up / 2021