ARTIST STATEMENTS

Don’t Show This to Anybody (Exhibition Statement)

I have a photo-postcard of a lady in a fancy hat, c. 1910. The image has been colorised. The combination of outfit, photograph and tint meant it would have been quite an expensive thing to have made. “Please don’t die when you look at this” she writes to ‘Mitt’ as she describes herself and new clothes in detail, “…now don’t show this to any body [sic] or I won’t send you anymore.”

Don’t Show This to Anybody brings together five bodies of work by British-born artist Tom Butler, all investigating the complexities of the photographic image. The works on view deny us visual information (the primary function of photography) to explore the sculptural qualities of the medium. Butler emphasizes how found images have been treated over time and how photographs can inhibit our natural ability to forget. 

Bright Corners 01, 2019, is part of an ongoing series of self-portraits concerned with the relationship between hiding and performing. Here, the artist attempts to empty his body and replace it with one of the most private spaces of his house.

Pencils of Nature, 2019-2022, is a collection of over 100 individual sculptures made from Victorian cabinet cards and vintage studio photographs. In a conceptual riff on Fox Talbot’s 1844 text, where Talbot asserted that the photograph would one day replace the pencil, Butler’s, ‘Pencils’, are a creative attempt to devolve early photographs back into pencils, styluses, and hand-tools, for purposes unknown.

Ghostcards, 2021-2022, are panel mounted cabinet cards painted over with layers of gesso. The gesso is sanded, repainted, and waxed until the figure sits at the brink of visibility, like a fading memory.

Photorubbings, 2021-2022, highlight Butler’s fascination with photographs as objects. A photograph can display its own unintended histories and narratives - whether it was kept in an album, folded in a wallet, protected in an archival sleeve, or scratched and torn to pieces.

Bronzetypes, 2022 are bronze casts of Victorian cabinet cards made by the burnout method which incinerates the original. Like the rubbings, the bronzes capture the original in every way except the pictorial. These celebrate the form, dents and embossing to draw our attention away from the sitter to a wider sense of absence and the human need to preserve by creating photographic objects.

Tom Butler, 2022

ROOMS

Rooms is an expansive series of pencil and ink and gouache drawings of imagined interiors. Each room — many are inspired by places from my past — comprises of sections of wall and floor, yet none appear complete. Sometimes gaping holes appear. In others, a screen seems to conceal a corner or perhaps a person.

I am fascinated by different forms of interiority, both physically and metaphorically and my rooms are meant to be viewed as poetic spaces. They are infused with thoughts, fears and anxieties and thus these personified spaces often seem to have sinister personalities or macabre senses of humour. They can appear like abandoned department stores or art galleries, empty Victorian homes or forgotten attic spaces but some of the barest and most metaphysical seem stripped to the boards, breaking apart and free floating, speaking more to a wider sense of fragility than specific geographic locations.

This year in particular these rooms have become places to house and organise my thoughts and apprehensions as well as opportunities to re-visit my most treasured artistic locations, physically and emotionally. Yet like so many rooms of our pasts most do not exist anymore having been demolished, rebuilt, or now simply inaccessible due to re- occupancy or moving away - like the now demolished studios of Chelsea College of Art and the studios of Francesca Woodman, which I have only visited through photographs.

Others, having been fictionalised in the first place, never existed at all, so they remain only in my imagination, such as Frankenstein’s creature’s lean-to and the Solaris Space Station. All of which means they are subject to fading, fracture or embellishment.

Tom Butler, 2020