Garry Buckley
My work is always evolving. Not just in style, but in subject matter, genre and the media in which I work. So for me, the creative process is often one that includes a measure of journey. I enjoy working in many creative spaces and playing with mediums and techniques, affording me great breadth in my working practice, which ultimately makes for an exciting migration through experiences and disciplines.
Inspirations are constantly changing too, evolving, swapping and then re-evolving into a mixture of renewed interests and passions. For instance, my recent travels to Berlin to exhibit as part of the Pictoplasma International Festival of Contemporary Character Art and Design sparked a renewed interest in character-centric narrative, combined with one of my perennial interests for pre-Renaissance religious painting and iconography.
The physical journey to Berlin carried me from London through Western Europe, through its many enchanting museums and galleries, castles and historical sites, which are inspiring and captivating.
From this spark of enthusiasm, I found myself drawn to the idea of representing pop surrealism through wonderful and imagined characters, revered as icons of a contemporary world, drawn not only from the completely imaginary but also from our anthropological past and the natural world around us.
My latest work, produced for the Pictoplasma show in Berlin and presented here, reflects this renewed interest in the icons of religious art mixed with contemporary character design. Exploring religious iconography through artifact and painting, the work uses my own imagined creatures arranged in reverence to ask questions about romanticised characters in our own metaphysical world and how doctrine can be established through the presentation of objects and images held in veneration.
Both ‘The Reliquary of the Sacred Heart’ and the ‘Resurrection of the Sacred Heart’ make those ideals into account. The reliquary is venerated as an object even before considering the meanings of the characters and symbolisms held within its form.
It is an object dedicated to creativity, the process by which we all, as creative people, adhere—an ideal that our passion for imaginative expression is one above everything else, the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing at night. Our creativity and affection for imaginative wonder becomes our religion.
Fanciful creative play allows us to explore the imagining of worlds that are impossible, unattainable or unattached from the confines of this corporeal world. If fantasy is extraordinary, other worldly, then imagination is the sacred key that unlocks the door to these wonderful worlds.
