The images for the project 'A Bather' by Sander Coers are composed of numerous archival photographs of the artist sourced from his family albums, all gathered during his research for the project Excess Baggage (a body of work exploring how memory shapes our idea of home).
Many of the childhood images he found depicted him at the beach or by the water. Sander Coers fed this material, alongside more recent personal portraits, into an AI model to generate a representation of himself as a bather, one of the most recurring visual tropes in Western art history. The resulting work can be understood as a self-portrait, though not in a literal sense: it portrays rather an idea or constructed memory of himself.
This artwork is made as a tapestry and produced using a jacquard weaving technique. The digital loom allows a digital image to be translated into a textile artwork with remarkable precision and depth.