TEXT/ Metamorphosis, Dialogues I Sculpt, Eventually Static, This Thing, a Sort of Self

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This project is an exploration of the COVID19 Lockdown from the perspective of the artist. Working from home, with restrictive social, physical mobility, touch starvation and limited access to materials, Buttner explored the kitchen environment, as an enforced creative neoliberal workplace.  A palpable sense of the body without human touch, a dialogue of transcendence, an adaption of the Kafka story, engaging sculpture, painting, video and sound, investigating Buttner'e over whelming compulsion to maintain self-promotion within grey space. 

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Researching and manipulating modes of transcendence, staying home, being creative, working in a small space, at the kitchen table, with things to hand, with family close by, with washing drying, and with cooking happening. Placing value on process, virtual audiences were invited to experience how art functions for most artists, how it sits and evolves in our homes and studios, something done and made on the fringes, against the dogma of ridged systems.  Susan used industrial as well as handmade materials to question feelings of isolation, containment, competition and judgement and the everyday life's constant online connectedness. Shared through the grey zone, providing an alternate language for discovering and articulating bodily experiences of the COVID19 Lockdown 2020. 

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A year on, in Lockdown 3, 2021, with heightened awareness of the touch and proximity, Insect head, (video) and Exposition of things to hand, 2021 (installation fragment), Buttner continues her motivation to escape and transform herself from human material. Enabling a haptic experience, a sort of empathetic communication, where not everything can be understood, she attempts to maintain self-promotion, a hyper conscious image of self.  

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This project was made with support from the Arts Council of Ireland, COVID Response Award 2020. 

 

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