Flying/Drowning: Heidi Bucher’s Spatial Impressions

This talk will examine the latex “skinnings” (Häutungen) of architectural spaces by the Swiss sculptor, Heidi Bucher (1926–1993). Bucher began working with flexible and synthetic materials during a formative period in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and when she returned to Zürich, she began taking latex impressions of architecture, first of her studio and then of her family's homes. This talk focus on Bucher’s work at the Sanatorium Bellvue in Kreuzlingen (1988) and it will present her castings of domestic and disciplinary spaces in relation to theoretical discussions about spatial perception, historical time, and the formative and reproductive potential of rubber developed in the late nineteenth century. Through Bucher’s spatial impressions, we may understand latex to be an “untimely medium” for the history of modern sculpture, one that resists ideologies of progress and invention as it registers its own imminent destruction.

IMAGE: Heidi drags yesterday into today (Floor of the Ahnenhaus), 1980. Courtesy The Estate of Heidi Bucher © 2019.