Task 4

Said Now, For All Time at the Southampton City Gallery is an in-depth view into the dream world that is Christopher Bucklow’s work. Spanning his whole art career, the exhibition takes us through 4 rooms combining his paintings and drawings from the past ten years, including photographic pinhole works from the Guest series. He starts the exhibition with his landscape pieces that encompass his humble beginnings, symbolic of his journey at 17, in which he hitch-hiked from his home in Manchester to Southampton just to see a piece in the gallery’s collection. Alongside Alfred Sisley’s Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint-Cloud is Bucklow’s response, he highlights the great importance of his inspirations here. It’s obvious to me by looking at his works, Christopher Bucklow’s imagination knows no bounds. His dreams and his conscious reactions to them are the driving force as he works. His stunning recent series The Guests are images of human silhouettes made up of thousands of tiny constellations, as if a whole universe is within these figures. He used roughly 25,000 pinholes in his huge homemade camera, equating to 25,000 days/70 years- a typical lifespan of a human(i). In an interview with Installation Magazine, he describes how he wanted to portray, to ‘celebrate an aspect of the human entity’ that he ‘had begun to see in a new light’. He sees the human as a vessel that contains two existences, The Host and The Guest, in which since the beginning of human life The Guest has become more prominent as our brains, language and genetics enhanced. He considers this an ‘external organ’ of ours, something that ‘precedes us’. This exhibition takes us through the incredible thought process and story-telling of Bucklow, an informative and inspiring exhibition to say the least.