David Buckley is an Irish artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. Since graduating from the MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London, his work has been included in Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the ICA in 2010; the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award Exhibition 2011, at the Contemporary Art Society, in Leap 2012 and at the Zabludowicz Collection in London 2014. He has also exhibited at the Münster Austellunghalle and Konstnarhüset in Stockholm. He has undertaken number of residencies, at Northlands Glass, Caithness, Scotland; Cité des Arts in Paris; Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop; Kinokino in Sandnes, Norway. In 2016 he curated the exhibition Fanzines: A Cut-and-Paste Revolution at the Barbican Centre in London.

Certain kinds of objects have certain kinds of authority. Both cultural and commercial value are associated with solidity, permanence, rarity, provenance, the touch of the makers hand, which leaves a fingerprint maybe. Or a signature. I have been working with these ideas of authority for a while, and trying to make objects that function within different registers of power. My recent work centres around small to medium sized abstract sculptures, influenced by the formalism of artists like Jean Fautrier or Rodin or Brancusi, but undercutting the cultural authority that goes along with them by using a process by which cracks are trained across the surface, meaning that the finished sculptures appear to be paused at a moment of disintegration. These cracks then provide another way to play with the authority of the object; in some I wedge found materials into the cracks (the way you might absent-mindedly wedge a bus ticket into the back of the seat in front of you), or using a smoke machine to slowly pump smoke through the object, turning it into a comic-horror prop. Some of them are studded with jewels, a process of decoration that seems a bit peculiar for an object that’s might be falling apart.

You can see more about David’s work, and that of all our studio artists, on our Studio Artist page.

Image: David Buckley