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On Nomi
by Kate Bryan, co-curator of the exhibitionBorn in London in 1985 and based in Brooklyn, Zoë Buckman’s multidisciplinary practice incorporates sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, and large-scale public installations. Adopting an explicitly feminist approach, her work explores identity, trauma, and gendered violence, subverting preconceived notions of vulnerability and strength.
NOMI is the artist’s first solo presentation in London and marks a powerful and timely homecoming. The exhibition presents a focused body of work that was born from grief and trauma. Over the past two years, Buckman has undertaken a difficult, complex and spiritual journey resulting in a tentative yet defiant proclamation of love and joy as an antidote to the darker side of life. From a real voyage in India, to a psychological journey with EMDR, an interactive psychotherapy technique, Buckman lays herself vulnerable in new works which play with dualities of hard and soft, masculine and feminine, domestic and surreal.
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“The limiting and confining conditions of 2020 triggered memories for me of the times I’ve been held back, literally or symbolically, by patriarchal forces. It put me further in touch with an internal source that exists inside us all: a well of freedom and joy where our wilder instincts originate. I see this force in the women who surround me, in the Divine Feminine, and within myself.” - Zoe Buckman, November 2020.
Buckman often plays with unexpected juxtapositions in her choice of presentation and source material. Incorporating vintage fabrics such as household linens, and in previous works lingerie and wedding dresses, Buckman teases out narrative from the previous life of the materials that inhabit a feminine and domestic sphere. Text is an integral part of her practice and Buckman’s snippets often bear witness to violence, aggression and grief. It is through elegant combinations employing natural forms and dancing figures, and an unashamedly beautiful presentation, that Buckman ensures hope and joy resonant throughout the show.
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Her alter ego, NOMI, is expressed in works that reclaim the serpentine motif from negative patriarchal connotations. Her snakes are all powerful, skin shedding, weaving their way on the page between chakras and handwritten excerpts from her ongoing poem, Show Me Your Bruises Then. Her hanging sculptures created using boxing gloves unite associations of violence and masculinity with a kind of pristine, sweat and impact free femininity.
Her latest work creates space for multiple narratives, enigmatic forms and elevates the ‘unfinished’. Stains mark the page, threads hang loose, text is not always sewn but sometimes printed and pinned on. Consequently, a raw edge permeates and the collage works feel like they are in the act of becoming. NOMI is given free reign, birthing powerful serpent deities with doilies, photography, textiles and ink. Buckman makes work from a personal and introspective position but always engages directly with her audience, inviting them to make their own associations, realisations and even space for healing.
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In Conversation: Zoë Buckman & Toyin Ojih Odutola
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to present an exclusive conversation between New York-based, British artist, Zoë Buckman and Nigerian, New York-based artist Toyin Ojih Odutola marking the opening of NOMI, Zoë Buckman's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Focusing on her most recent body of work, this lively discussion draws out the breadth, subtlety and empathy of the artist's practice.
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'This body of work is so timely, though of course it’s never not been “timely” to address what Buckman considers in NOMI. This is true of most political art—our issues as a society are not new. It’s exciting to see the work continue to grow and expand and Buckman continue to extend herself, adding necessary nuance and her unique perspective as a thinker and maker to these important conversations.'
Rujeko Hockley, Curator
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Gloves
Buckman's boxing glove sculptures continue to evolve in dialogue with her wider practice, through shared materiality and an intimacy with the body. Exaggerating the form of the hand, each glove focuses on that part of our anatomy where emotions are stored and expressed - from tender companionship to anger and aggression. These conflicting sentiments are amplified in the function of the gloves themselves - used to protect the wearer and harm her opponent. Each pair, coming together as individuals, or two halves of a whole, invite the viewer to question dualities and seeming contradictions. Whilst time turned chains into rust presents gloves hanging side by side with curled palms touching in intimate companionship, those of & I can fall into your creases clasp hands, balancing atop one another, perfectly poised in a moment of precarious harmony. In contrast to their combative form, each glove is enveloped in fabrics bedecked with trailing leafy tendrils or embroidered with floral embellishments. By employing vintage materials typically used around the kitchen table, Buckman brings her interrogation of gender into the home and its history. Patterns reminiscent of the 1970s evoke comfort and nostalgia, whilst tea towels serve as a material reminder of domestic labour. The importance of dialogue between generations is beautifully encapsulated in the tumbling red flowers of & Ganga water glistens. This work, sewn from tea towels passed down from Buckman's grandmother to her late mother, form a celebration of this relationship.
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THROUGH THE CRADLE
2021In contrast to their two-glove counterparts, Buckman's large-scale boxing glove sculptures represent a bulkier, more generous form, suggestive of the body as a whole. Composed of multiple gloves hanging downwards, through the cradle presents an ample, weighty presence, caught in suspension - at once substantial and light. Whilst Buckman adorns each distinctively, adopting a variety of materials, patterns and textures, together they form a close-knit community, united by their shared form. Trailing with delicate mohair threads, curling turquoise koi carp are appliquéd onto one white glove; as though a quilt, another is decorated with blue patchwork squares; several gloves are encased in red and white check tea towels, further embellished with sculptural flowers and crotched lace; another is wrapped with a bold floral pattern picked out with primary colours. The work's title, through the cradle, points to the shared experience of childhood and to the labour of childcare, an experience not common to all. With each glove, Buckman explores the home as a locus of individual and collective experience for women.
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‘Buckman points to Louise Bourgeois as one of her ‘spiritual mothers’; indeed these bodily forms, suspended from chains, reference Bourgeois’s hanging sculptures.’
Nicole Miller, Hyperallergic, 2019
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Thread
Together with short phrases of text, Buckman's new flat textile works incorporate figurative imagery for the first time, to explore the experience of womanhood through multiple, fragmentary perspectives. By using vintage fabrics - tea towels, table runners and handkerchiefs - Buckman also incorporates their history. The creases, marks and stains point to the experience of their previous owners - women who used this cloths to mop up spills, but also to decorate the home. These short phrases appear with little context, leaving the viewer to their own interpretation. Uncertainty of meaning, explored throughout this new body of work, is further reflected in Buckman's loosely rendered female forms. In she kicks stones out of the path, women dancing or raising their hands in prayer are embroidered onto a cream tea towel decorated with blue cornflowers. The artist depicts each figure in outline only, leaving areas incomplete and trailing threads that hang loosely in front of and behind the images.
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NOMI
2020NOMI – like you don’t know me – is the nickname the artist gave to her shadow-self, an unwavering source of power, creativity and resilience. Through NOMI, the artist contends with the stains of past experience. From each brain-like form, vibrant images burst forth – snakes, predatory animals, awesome deities, and joyous women, dancing or in prayer. In recognising the permeable line between states of agony and ecstasy, Buckman finds healing in pure expression.
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‘These are portraits, after a fashion. Strands of memory plucked and recast, taut and tender but also slightly soured, all the devastations, disappointments and traumas, but also warmth, affection and joy.’
Max Lakin, Garage Magazine, 2019
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"NOMI, Zoe Buckman’s alter-ego and the title of this searingly beautiful body of work, is a heartbeat away from noema, which means an object of thought, that which is perceived. In this new series, Buckman dives deep into her mind and soul to discover visual archetypes for her own self-understanding born from trauma. What results are signs and symbols—drawn, sewn, and sculpted—of self-empowerment and the joy in its discovery."
Nancy Spector, Curator and Art Historian, 2021
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Paper
New collaged compositions on paper draw on Buckman's personal experience of trauma and healing. Addressing vulnerability and confinement - feelings exacerbated and now familiar to all during the pandemic - the artist finds hope in transformation. The image of twin circular forms reoccurs throughout this body of work, a symbol influenced by the artist's undergoing EMDR, a form of trauma therapy that accesses the left and right-hand sides of the brain alternately. This process is viscerally represented with delicate lace doilies, layered, blotted with ink, or joined together with dark, dense mohair thread. Making oblique reference psychological and physical wounding, the artist's emotive choice of materials points to violence within the domestic sphere and harmful conceptions of virginity.
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'[Buckman's] superpower seems to be finding the razor's edge between delicate and fierce, beauty and agony. The result is magnificent tension.'
Stuart Sheldon, Cultured, 2019
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Text
Language continues to be a key element of Buckman's practice. Appropriating text from 'show me your bruises then', a free flowing poem the artist has been developing since 2018, Buckman presents an intimate and personal voice. Words from this text appear in her work's titles, as well as embroided or handwritten onto the works themselves. Whilst these short phrases punctuate this body of work with the artist's voice, each appears with little context. Underlining the ambiguity of meaning assigned to familiar words, Buckman leaves the viewer to their own interpretation. Short phrases such as 'banter' (how many bodies have been swallowed by banter) and 'you're walking fine to me' (kissing my teeth), expose how easily words may project humour or violence. Longer texts, Things she'll never forget and he pitched digits, present a lyrical snapshot, hinting at a wider narrative.
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‘Your work […] it helps us ease into death. It’s not scary. […] At the heart, coming out of when you made it, coming out of what you experienced, and what we’ve all collectively experienced, is this idea that nothing is certain, but that’s okay, because what you choose to do with the time you are allotted, right now, is the definitive, that’s all that you need.’
Toyin Ojih Odutola, 2021
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To invest in love, to love love
Text by William J. SimmonsTo invest in love, to love love, as Zoë Buckman does, is to simultaneously acknowledge the possibility of degradation, which, I think, Buckman does not see as a binary. We hope and pray to some higher power, perhaps the Divine Feminine, that such degradation will abate, that it will not be permanent, that it might unwind like thread or explode into a multichromatic dream that dances within and among joy and regret, running out of time and imbued with all the time and desire in the world.
It is not enough to say that Buckman renders (a word that floats in melting, hot fat) the abject as beautiful, for we, as survivors of sexual assault, know that the two may at times be one, and not in the sense of a glamorization. Indeed beauty and abjection, touch and violence, may form a collage or a photomontage or a honeycomb. At times they may be two, three, innumerable warps and wefts, just as our own bodies might be, and with the passage of time the abject and the beautiful inevitably become some thing: an object with use value like a pot holder, or something we might degrade as ornamental, like a sculpture or a wall hanging or a femme body or a poem.
Speaking of poems, I need to say finally that Buckman is a poet, since only a poet could make me, gently and with heartbreak, recall strong arms both tender and hateful. And Buckman gives me permission to recall them with love, with fear. I cry in the shower, thinking of Lady Gaga's "Artpop" music video. I want what could have been and I reject it vehemently.
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'Creating work where there are incomplete forms, where ink bleeds unpredictably, where I cannot control the exact formation of the wet ink on the fabric or the ways in which the threads will dangle and even tangle once framed - that's teaching me how to surrender to what is, and love it, however uncomfortable it makes me.'
Zoë Buckman, Soft Punk Magazine, 2021
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About Zoë Buckman
Zoë Buckman (b. 1985 Hackney, East London) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been included in shows at The Museum of Art and Design, NY; MOCA, VA; The Camden Arts Centre, London; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; The Children’s Museum of the Arts, NY; Indiana University, IN; the Democratic National Convention, PA; the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, GA; and The National Museum of African-American History & Culture, Washington, DC. In 2018, the Art Production Fund commissioned Champ, Buckman’s first public art installation. The kinetic sculpture featured a glowing uterus with boxing gloves in place of ovaries, an assertive symbol of female empowerment standing 43 feet tall above Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood. Collections include Baltimore Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. Upcoming exhibitions include THIS IS AMERICA, Kunstraum Potsdam, Germany; Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York
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Exhibition List
