Carmel Buckley

“Carmel Buckley Sculpture and Prints,” Clay Street Press, Cincinnati, OH, 2011

Solo exhibition

This show became a mini-retrospective in the fall of 2011. I was initially invited to do a series of prints at Clay Street Press, a print workshop and gallery in Cincinnati. I was later asked to do an exhibition that would highlight work from the past seventeen years.

The series of six prints made in the summer of 2011 extended my interest in book illustration from the nineteenth and the early-twentieth centuries. In this series I looked at the work of J. J. Grandville from the Les Fleurs Animées. These works used detailed line and pattern to invent a contemporary drawing vocabulary in reference to the intensely rendered imagery of Grandville’s originals. The prints are a response to looking at the illustrated works and prompt my own further investigations. Referencing these earlier drawings allowed me to explore aspects of perception and legibility, the physical qualities of drawn marks, repetition, and the materiality of images on paper.

In this exhibition I also had the opportunity to show my “diptych” drawings, which investigate making a mark by drawing and sewing the same image. In this series I often began with an object that I would trace or draw through, and I then replicate it again, sewing the image onto a second sheet of paper. I would have to devise a thread stitch that would in some way echo or replicate the mark that the pen would make when drawing the form. From a distance the drawings are very similar, like fraternal twins, but on closer inspection the work does very different things. The sewn paper and three-dimensionality of the drawn/sewn area defy initial expectations, and one becomes very aware of the making of the piece and of the materiality and the puckered fragility of the paper with the sewn section embedded in its fibers.

The sculpture in the exhibition brought together different strands of my work from the Tools for the Imagination series of the early/mid-1990s to recent soft sculpture. This work hadn’t been showed together previously, and the exhibition served as an opportunity to connect and evaluate the relationships in my work between drawing, printmaking, and sculpture.

The exhibition was reviewed by Alan Porcaro, CityBeat: “In Love with Line,” and by Fran Watson, Aeqai: “Carmel Buckley’s Universe, at Clay Street Press.”