What responsibility does an artist have to care for her viewers? Zoë Buckman thinks deeply about this question and discusses it in a recent conversation with Colossal.
One thing that’s important to me has to do with beauty and softness. Those are definitely tools that I embrace and harness. I know that I’m exploring something that is very difficult and triggering. It’s always been important to me that I make work that draws people in and creates an environment for conversations about violence, rape, abortion, miscarriage, and all of these things. In the work itself, I am trying to care for viewers.
Much of Buckman’s output during the past few years has championed the fight: that of resilient survivors, of rebelling against the patriarchy, and of her own sparring with the art world as she sought to use mediums historically associated with “women’s work” to put critical issues front and center. Her new series, though, titled Tended and on view at Lyes & King, takes a softer approach, which Buckman discusses in this conversation about her early indoctrination in feminism and what it’s like to raise a child around such difficult, and undoubtedly necessary, work.
Detail of “thoughts run out my hands like a gecko” (2023)
Detail of “songs leak from my bedroom walls” (2023)
Left: “holy ash” (2023). Right: “thoughts run out my hands like a gecko” (2023). Photos by Charles Benton
