Christopher Bucklow – If this be not I

An evening with artist Christopher Bucklow at the British Museum

With Nick Hackworth (Evening Standard Art Critic)

16 July 2004, Stevenson Lecture Theatre

To coincide with his BM artist residency and the exhibition ‘I will Save Your Life’ at The Riflemaker Gallery, London W1

Christopher Bucklow used his residency at the British Museum as ambitious quest to arrive at a new body of work, which represented a fusion of his interests in mythology, psychology and neuroscience. It provided an opportunity to meet scholars from his chosen areas of interest and became his way of gathering new insights and testing out his theories. The Museum’s collection was a significant inspiration to him because so many of the artefacts draw from the mythology of world cultures. Mythology is what our ancestors rated so highly and what psychoanalysts argue may still be within our subconscious.

Bucklow has developed a system of mapping his life taking significant inspiration from the cosmographical diagrams of the medieval monk, Opicinus de Canistrische. He has worked out that his most significant dreams always occur on certain days of the month and he has plotted some three hundred of them on his circular life-chart. We all have aspects of self-knowledge scattered around our consciousness and Christopher Bucklow’s new work represents his attempt to bring them together so that they form a unity, a nucleus to proceed. By peering into the magnificent unexplored depths of the self his new work is a quest for truth, to make some sense of the world as he puts it: - ‘The project goes on. It may be never-ending: the perfect subject for art – puzzling, elusive, labyrinthine’.