Here they are, two otters, sporting their Sunday-best hats, laden with luggage, waiting at the station for the next part of their journey. Awaiting Transportation reflects the artist’s thoughts about issues that she visits regularly in her art. A key theme is that of migration and its connotations of displacement, which is intensified in the context of forced migration in wartime. This leads to considerations of war, the adversity it creates, its effect on people’s lives. In Awaiting Transportation the small Star of David on the suitcase is redolent with memories of the plight of the Jews in Europe during World War II. Here, awaiting transportation to an unknown destination is a proud married couple dressed up in their finery, literally putting their best foot forward. With a trusting innocence, believing Nazi propaganda, they have dutifully packed their belongings in readiness for a journey to ‘another place’.
Bucknall’s Brick Bay image has a source in old photographs of immigrants arriving to settle in post-war Britain. Wearing their finest clothes and hats, carrying their baggage, they had embarked on the long voyage from places such as Jamaica and Africa. Often down-trodden but driven by determination, hope and faith in a better future, these ingenuous individuals had undertaken this journey to a new, strange land.
British by birth, Lucy Bucknall attended art school at Birmingham and Bath, majoring in painting and sculpture. After graduating with Honours in 1988 she began to specialize in a technique that has become her trademark, fabricated phosphor bronze. In this distinctive method, bronze sheet is cut into pieces that are shaped and welded together using bronze rod, then reshaped further with an angle grinder. This form of fabrication produces an effect that looks semi open, which in turn creates a variegated surface of light and shade. It also makes it practically impossible to reproduce these works by casting; each of these pieces is a ‘one off’, none is an edition. Bucknall has made this method her own; no other artist either here or in Great Britain is known to be working in this technique. Since moving to New Zealand in 1998 Lucy Bucknall has also established a reputation for her trademark animals standing on hind legs imitating humankind in their demeanour and accessories. Particularly popular was her group of meerkat soldiers, Special Forces on Patrol which in 2009 was the winner of The People’s Choice Award at Sculpture on the Gulf.
RW