Christopher Bucklow - Bodies of Work

Bodies of Work

If This Be Not I: This is a collection, in book form, of drawings and paintings done by Christopher Bucklow between 1999 and 2004. It contains works from the series The Mancunian Heresy as well. It also contains writings, essays by Bucklow and others, as well as interviews. The drawings and paintings themselves have been made with a variety of media including graphite on paper, wax crayon on paper, oil, carbon, silicon, cast IUDs. The book is an excellent source for understanding the mental processes behind the making of Bucklow's work. The images can be seen on his website which is referenced below.

Guest: Bucklow is best known for his Guest series. It establishes a cast of characters drawn from his circle of acquaintances. Unlike conventional photography, each image is unique and unrepeatable. The process Bucklow uses creates an unusually intense quality of light, and the images are formed using sunlight with a technique similar to the pinhole photography developed in the late nineteenth century. He begins by making a life-sized silhouette drawing from the sitter's shadow on a sheet of aluminium foil, which is then penetrated with thousands of pinholes within the outline of the shape. These pinholes act as the camera's lenses. Using a large homemade camera, he then places the foil on top and loads colour photographic paper at the back. Sunlight is then allowed to shine through, recording many images of the sun and sky simultaneously, thus forming the shape of the figure on the paper behind. Bucklow achieves variation in the different works depending on the intensity of the sunlight, the time of day, and the duration the pinholes are exposed to the light. This work was begun in the 1990s, beginning with the series The Beauty of the World, which is made up of images using the same technique, but including different patterns and designs instead of silhouettes of people. These works are ongoing, along with the series Tetrarchs made using the same photographic process. These works can be seen on Bucklow's website- link below.

To Reach Inside a Vault: Bucklow's most recent body of work is a series of paintings which he is thinking of presenting under the title To Reach Inside a Vault. These are oil paintings on canvas, mostly very large in size. (The image shown here, for example is 64×200 inches.) They are filled with symbols which Bucklow describes as being produced by his mind as authentic symbols for itself. The paintings seem to flow out of him, to be thought about and analyzed only after they are finished. Bucklow says, in talking about his motives in making these works, "I question the role and place of my consciousness within the totality of my unconscious mental systems" (taken from an interview with the artist in eyeful magazine, 2009). These works seem to be the next step in the thinking that Bucklow has been doing all along in his study of and making of art. The works will be shown at Riflemaker Gallery in 2009/2010.