Artist Chris Bucklow has been many things: a writer, a curator and, just as relevantly, an amateur astronomer. A trip to Botswana to view Halley's comet was the impetus to finally leave London's Victoria and Albert Museum, where he had worked for 10 years, and take up art fulltime. The now 52-year-old Bucklow started creating paintings of how he imagined the electrical activity of people dreaming would look like from outer space, but, unsatisfied with the result, sought a photographic method to portray his visions.
The result is the artist's long-running "Guest" series. Bucklow takes giant sheets of tin foil, places photographic paper underneath them and then places both in the daylight before slowly poking holes in the foil to form life-size silhouettes of his subjects. It is like a large-scale camera obscura, and depending on which holes are punched first, the intensity of the exposure varies. The subjects are usually the artist's friends, who also represent different aspects of his own psyche. Recently, however, he was commissioned to create a portrait of German supermodel Claudia Schiffer for the November edition of the British Harper's Bazaar. Those works and others from his "Guest" series are now on show at the Emon Gallery in Tokyo's Hiroo.
Solar in nature, the works are cosmic in appearance — human figures made out of constellations of bright stars — and it appears that Bucklow has succeeded in achieving his original intention of capturing the stuff of dreams.