Working between Zürich and London, visual artist and textile designer Dominique Lanz engages with fabric as both medium and metaphor—a material that carries the weight of industry, ecology, identity, and myth. Her practice, rooted in deadstock and second-hand textiles, is shaped by an acute awareness of the waste crisis within global fashion industries.
Lanz’s work begins with discarded Spiderman bedsheets, torn William Morris prints, curtains, bedding—remnants of everyday domestic life. Gathered from a charity shop in London, where high and low culture sit unknowingly side by side, they become raw data for transformation. She layers, glues, cuts, prints, and reconfigures them, oscillating between the slowness of handcraft and the precision of digital machinery. This back-and-forth is central to her process: screen-printing for its unpredictability, digital cutting for its precise lines, and the act of “fighting a bit with the machine” as a generative tension between intention and accident.
Her sculpture I was around your house when you weren’t there, now part of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich’s collection, embodies this dialogue. A diptych composed of a flat, portal-like textile and a swollen sculptural form on the ground, the work collapses distinctions between surface and body, waste and value, decay and transformation. The three-dimensional piece speaks to the uncontrollable mass of global textile waste—a material body formed from what society tries to forget or erase.
Lanz describes this second form as almost creaturely—what one curator affectionately calls “the caterpillar.” It is gluttonous, swollen, alive with an implied before-and-after: the devouring of excess and the possibility of metamorphosis.
Within the work, familiar binaries collapse. William Morris appears beside children’s bedsheets; silk sits next to cheap synthetics. Once discarded, these materials share the same fate—value flattened in death, hierarchy dissolved. Yet in her hands, they return with new life, pushed into forms never intended for them. Lanz’s desire to twist textiles into unexpected directions moves beyond fashion and utility, challenging the narratives imposed on these materials during their first lives.
While her practice critiques fast fashion’s relentless cycles, it also gestures toward a more poetic temporality. Her sculptures “freeze time”—moments suspended against the velocity of contemporary consumption. And yet the works themselves remain vulnerable, shifting, slowly aging. As with all living things, they carry the inevitability of change.
Through these tensions—between past and present, craft and machine, fragility and permanence—Dominique Lanz’s textiles become portals: openings into the unseen labour, forgotten materials, and entangled ecologies that shape our daily lives. They remind us that waste is never gone; it only moves. And that transformation, even from what appears worthless, is both possible and necessary.
