‘They Are Used for Great Harm, as Well as for Protection’: Artist Zoë Buckman on the Symbolism of Boxing Gloves and Her Latest New York Show

As she welcomes artnet News into her Brooklyn loft, 34-year-old
artist Zoë Buckman is apologetic. Most of
her new work is at her gallery, Fort Gansevoort in Manhattan, and
her home and studio—a space suffused with gorgeous natural light—is
instead something of a mini-retrospective of the artist’s career,
full of works she’s shown at previous exhibitions as well a few
pieces that didn’t make it into the current show, her first in New
York in five years.

Titled “Heavy Rag,” the personal show expands on Buckman’s
series, “Let Her Rave,” which
took its name from the John Keats poem “Ode on Melancholy.” A
longtime boxer, Buckman began creating sculptures from boxing
gloves, covering them in vintage tablecloths, napkins, and tea
towels. In other works, she has covered the gloves in lacy,
ultra-feminine scraps from wedding dresses.

“The form and the symbolism of boxing gloves, with their hard
and soft qualities, can be explored artistically and visually in so
many different ways,” Buckman said. “They are made with the
softest, most beautiful leather, but they are used for great harm,
as well as for protection.”

Digging Into Her Roots

The artist, who grew up in London, has been thinking a lot about
home recently. Her mother died from cancer this January, and the
exhibition expresses her grief.

“When my mother got sick, I felt drawn to make work that was
more about home and domesticity,” Buckman explained. Jennie
Buckman, a playwright and acting coach, was already sick for nine
years when she received a terminal diagnosis in early 2018. Her
daughter spent much of last year traveling back and forth from
London to be with her in her final months.

Buckman’s work has always been autobiographical. Her first
exhibition, “Present Life,” in 2015
at Garis & Hahn, then in New York, was a celebration of her
experience as a mother. It featured a sculpture of created from her
plastinated placenta, still prominently displayed next to the desk
where she works.

When she began working on her next show in the lead up to the
2016 election, Buckman explained, “I felt like there was this real
war on women—which of course there still is—and I was also at the
time separating out of my marriage” to actor David Schwimmer, whom
she wed in 2010.

“I was in a fight at home and in a fight politically, and I was
also beginning to hold my own more in the art world, in this
male-dominated space,” Buckman added.

But her work from that period was also emotionally taxing.

“I was working with my wedding dress and other women’s wedding
dresses for a long time. My studio was home to a lot of broken
dreams and failed marriages,” Buckman said. “I needed to bring
color and warmth into my life into my work. Although ‘Heavy Rag’
isn’t about the most celebratory themes, it has felt good to be
using fabrics that remind me of my mother and my grandmother.”

The works in “Heavy Rag” started with a set of tea towels
Buckman took back from her mother’s house, and quickly grew from
there. She was inspired by the fabric works of Louise
Bourgeois, but also by a childhood spent growing up around the
kitchen. “We didn’t have a fancy dining area. It was just
everyone around this big wooden kitchen table.”

In the past year, embroidery has also been a major focus, giving
her “a way to adjust to not having as much time in the studio,”
Buckman said. “You can take it on a flight, and I could do it while
my mom was resting.”

It’s also the medium that the artist, a graduate of New
York’s International Center of Photography, is most
comfortable working in. Buckman learned to embroider in school at
age 15, in a class that she chose because she thought it would be
easy. “And it was,” she says.

As friends and family learned about her new works, they began
offering other household fabrics, things passed down from their
mothers and grandmothers. “I’m bringing other people’s memories and
their lives into the work, and that’s more meaningful to me than if
I went to the store and bought a bunch of new fabrics,” Buckman
said. “I like the imperfections as well. Like, that could have been
a good night, all the red wine spilled on that tablecloth!”

But “Heavy Rag” also features an entirely new direction for the
artist: ceramics, which she has been learning to make since March.
“Tea really is what keeps my family going,” Buckman
explained. “However sick my mom was, she always had to have a
cup of tea by her bedside, even if she wasn’t well enough to drink
it.”

Buckman she started taking classes at New York’s Greenwich House Pottery, experimenting at
the pottery wheel and learning about glazing and firing the
porcelain. “There’s definitely similarities to embroidery. It’s
very close and detailed, meditative work,” Buckman said, noting
that she continued incorporating fabrics, creating imprints in the
porcelain with lace doilies and checkered tea towels.

“For the glazes, I wanted to use colors that would speak to
bruising and bleeding, and that’s actually quite a lot if you think
about it,” Buckman added. “Blue, black, green, red, purple, pink…
it was a process of experimenting with a bunch of different glazes
and I narrowed it down to about four.”

The title of the new show, “Heavy Rag,” of course recalls a
crude slang term for menstruation, but it also suggests women’s
role in cleaning up, mending scraped knees, and drying tears.

“We’re definitely the fixers,”Buckman said. But there’s also a
darker side to that, illustrated by embroidered new works that
repeat the word “stupid” and “idiot.” “When something bad happens,”
she lamented, “it’s also our fault.”

See more photos from the exhibition below.

“Zoë Buckman: Heavy Rag” is on view at Fort Gansevoort, 5
Ninth Avenue, New York, September 6–October 12, 2019.

The post ‘They Are Used for Great Harm, as Well as for
Protection’: Artist Zoë Buckman on the Symbolism of Boxing Gloves
and Her Latest New York Show appeared first on artnet
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