The strenght of Zoë Buckman's fist

It is unavoidable that societal disputes have found their way into people's hearts. But the fact that they've sparked the imagination of so many artists is remarkable.

Expressing one's thoughts through a creative medium is fundamental in order to involve more people in the entire sensory sphere experience. This also occurs in the realm of art.

Zoë Buckman has been expressing herself through her artwork and sculptures on these subjects long before 2020 came to light the numerous challenges our society has with race, gender, and sexuality.

British, class of 1985, she studied at The International Center of Photography (GS ‘09) and was awarded an Art Matters Grant in 2017. Personal and committed, his art is distinguished by the immediacy of the message.  Adopting an explicitly feminist approach, her work explores identity, trauma, and gendered violence through the use of garments and texts. «I look at text in my work as an opportunity to expand the viewer’s experience» declared during an interview for the Elephant in 2022.

 She began an artistic career focused on both group and solo shows using this multi-expressive and multi-disciplinary style.

In 2022, she attended the first global survey exhibition dedicated to the use of clothing as a medium of visual art, Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, at the MAD Museum of Art and Design in New York. The exhibition examines work by thirty-five international contemporary artists, from established names to emerging voices. By making or altering clothing for expressive purposes, these artists create garments, sculptures, installations, and performance art that transform the dress into a critical tool. Adopted globally as an artistic strategy, garment uses the language of fashion to challenge traditional divisions of form and function, cast a critical eye on the construction of gender, advance political activism, and address the cultural differences.

“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.” Zoë Buckman, November 2020

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.

Intriguing and full of meaning, the boxing glove distinguishes the artist from his earliest artwork. «Boxing put me back in touch with my inner fighter. It was natural that the gloves, these weapons clad in the softest leather that speak to masculinity and aggression, as well as protection and defence, should make their way into the work» she told during an interview to Elephant in 2022.

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 rein, 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, realizations, and even space for healing. Giving voice to concerns such as violence, sexual identity, and ethnicity is challenging, but needed. Since 2015, Zoë Buckman has been engaged in an expressive research project that begins with the individual and progresses to the communal. That same collective that frequently questions its own acts and choices, but might rediscover itself owing to these forms of artistic elaborations. When the meaning becomes significant, this is what happens.