ABOUT ME

Artist Statement

My work begins with a photograph and doesn't finish there.

I make portraits — women I trust, friends who sit with me in the light and let something true come through. But at some point I understood that the camera was only the beginning. That the image was asking for something more: texture, time, the mark of returning to it.

So I stitch into the photographs. Thread, pearls, the slow grammar of embroidery. What was two-dimensional becomes layered. What was a moment becomes an object. You can see the hours in it — and something about that changes how you look.

I'm drawn to transformation as a subject and as a process. What damage doesn't ruin. What persists when we strip everything back. What we hold back, and the trace it leaves. The pearls I place sometimes look like tears that didn't fall. I've made my peace with that.

The other body of work comes from a different kind of looking — objects arranged, lit, and photographed the way still-life painters used to light fruit and fabric. Ordinary things treated as if they always deserved that much attention.

What I keep coming back to is this: some things only reveal themselves slowly. The work is an argument for slowing down enough to look.

Bio

I'm Anaïs Pohler — Basel-based artist working at the intersection of photography and textile art.

I was born in Mexico and moved to Switzerland at nine. Between those two places, some things didn't transfer. Embroidery is one of them — a craft I should have grown up with, stitched into me early. I'm learning it now, in my forties, late and deliberately. That lateness feels like part of what I'm making.

I spent many years as a portrait photographer before I understood that I'd been making images that needed to be completed by hand. The camera was the beginning. Thread was what came next.

I work from my home studio in Basel. My prints and embroidered works are in this shop.