Artists

In The Threads That Hold the Earth Together, Dominique Bartels (she/her) traces the material histories of textiles and images. Archival footage of flax production in Switzerland around 1900 is interwoven with contemporary MiniDV recordings, while linen panels incorporate photographic film and magnetic tape into their weave. 
The work follows the threads that connect these different materials and technologies. Flax becomes linen; light becomes film, magnetic tape and digital image. What often appears immaterial is revealed to depend on fibres, supports and infrastructures. Instead of separating textile from image, Bartels reveals them as parallel ways of recording, carrying and transmitting information.
Weaving becomes both a material process and a way of thinking, binding together histories of labour, technology and memory.

How do documentary and artistic approaches come together in your practice?
Documentary work helps me understand a subject, explore it from different perspectives and make it accessible. Through the artistic process, I can experience and translate the same material through the body, intuition and experimentation. Both are part of the same research: one helps me understand and communicate something, while the other allows me to experience it and find a form for it.

How do analogue and digital processes interact in your practice?
For me, the analogue and the digital form a continuous back and forth. In both photography and textiles, I often start working with something physical, something I can see or touch. To unpack what that material carries, I take it through a technique or an editing process, allowing me to connect the material with my own ideas. Through this process, I find forms that bring those elements together, and the work becomes tangible again.