David Buckley // Profile

The Collector

My work is concerned with the cultural management of the unknown or the unknowable and the potential for political agency in works of art. Themes like the relationship of man to nature and the management of cultural and sexual difference lead to investigations, usually taking the form of fairly isolationist practices in which there is a degree of role-playing. These practices range from the urgent and obsessive, as in the crafting of charms or totems, to the cold and impersonal as in taxonomical drawings of natual phenomena. The work is often presented in configurations where each individual work offers an index by which other works can be read, sometimes harnessing the conventions of museum practices to examine how these ‘unknowns’ are defined and controlled.

Artist's CV