Christopher Bucklow - Life and Work As An Artist

Life and Work As An Artist

Bucklow's first projects were conceptual and sculptural, sometimes taking the form of interventions into the natural environment, inserting his un-natural sculptural works into Nature. The works themselves were plant forms that he had either altered genetically or otherwise altered by grafting species together. (Hyacinthus Orientalis at Selborne, Dianthus chris eubank, Potato-tomato plant, Pear-hawthorn graft, variously shown in 1993 at the Lisson gallery, London and in 1996 at the Museum of Modern art in Oxford).

It seems to be a feature of Christopher Bucklow's work – particularly his earlier work - that he often has/had projects running concurrently in different media. So that while these plant works were being made, he also began a series of Noosphere paintings and a set of portraits of monkeys at the Zoo and the Natural History Museum in London. On the theme of concurrent activities, Bucklow also continued to work at the V&A during this period. He resigned in 1995. "Looking back," says Bucklow, "I feel that the museum was an ideal place to nurture one’s mind, a safe and stimulating environment. In some way it feels as if it was an incubator, an extended period in a kind of university. It was also ideally situated as Prince Albert had intended, in the South Kensington complex which included the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, Imperial College and the Royal College of Art. All of art and nature on one site" (taken from a personal interview with the artist).

The plant sculptures ran between 1989 and 1993. In 1991 he began the series of Noosphere paintings mentioned above. These mutated into the first photographic pieces – the solar clusters collectively entitled The Beauty of the World of 1991-1995 - which would in turn mutate into the Guest series by late 1993. The Guest series and its development, the Tetrarchs is ongoing.

In 1995, Christopher Bucklow and Susan Percival were married at Appleton Thorn in Cheshire, and the following year they moved to Venice in Italy where he had a studio for almost two years.

While in Italy, Bucklow began to become involved in Blake again, and he became interested in the psychology of his own creative process, and further, in the development of his mind from childhood onwards. While in Italy he planned the video film he made in late 1996 called fju:zan (shown in NY in 1997). This re-enacted the making of his 1989 sculpture Hyacinthus Orientalis, but from the point of view or perspective of a psychological personification of the internal drives and energies that had motivated the making of the original work.

This work proved to be a one-off. In 1998 the Bucklows moved to Frome, in Somerset, and Christopher began a series of pencil drawings (shown under the collective title The Mancunian Heresy in London in 1999, some illustrated in his book If This Be Not I). That same year, he also built the building called the "Canopic Fusion Reactor", near St Ives in Cornwall (destroyed by arson December 31, 1999).

In 2002, Bucklow began the paintings and pastel drawings of the series he called I Will Save Your Life. These were exhibited at Riflemaker gallery in London in 2004, along with his dream rota or diary All I have left of You is Me.

The year 2005 was spent in Sewanee, Tennessee, at The University of the South, teaching art history and studio art. Out of the experience of creating the series of lectures for his course Symbolising the Self came Bucklow's book on Philip Guston: 'What is in the Dwat – the Universe of Guston’s Final Decade (Grasmere, 2007). "Also, in some way," reflects Bucklow, "came the confidence to let go of my conceptual ambitions and surrender control of my work to unconscious forces." The resulting works, paintings, perhaps to be titled as a group To Reach Inside a Vault will be shown by Riflemaker winter 2009/10.

The Bucklows currently reside in Somerset, England with their two children. Their daughter Beatrix was born in 2001, and their son Edward was born in 2005.