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Zoë Buckman, contemporary artist, (b. 1985, Hackney, East London, UK) attended the International Center of Photography, New York and has since expanded her practice to include sculpture, neon, and embroidery. Buckman currently lives and works in New York City with husband, actor David Schwimmer,   and daughter, Cleo Buckman Schwimmer.

Some major themes in her work include feminism and motherhood. As a multimedia artist, Buckman follows in something of a long tradition of women who have used the experience of motherhood as a source of inspiration in their work, including Mary Kelly, Louise Bourgeois, one of her personal favorite artists, and more recently, Marni Kotak.

Exhibtions
Zoë Buckman has had her work shown in group exhibitions including New Abstraction at Leila Heller Gallery; Contemporary Spotlight: TEXT, Paddle8; the Hidden Gems Project for Christie's; The Getty Images Gallery, London; and Small Is Beautiful at Flowers Gallery, East London. She was also a featured artist in Pulse Projects, New York, 2014. In Spring 2015, Buckman was chosen to participate in the Artist Residency Program at Mana Contemporary and was included in In Your Dreams, a group exhibition curated by Marina T. Schindler at the Spring/Break Art Show. She will also be part of Africa’s Out, a group exhibition at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, co-hosted by Wangechi Mutu to benefit Uhai Eashri, an organization with the mission to support, celebrate and protect the lives of the LGBTQI community in Africa.

Present Life
Buckman's body of work, Present Life, addresses the inexorable relationship between life and death through varied media including photography, sculpture, neon and installation. "As a series, its starting point was one directly informed by the Buckman’s highly personal experience of childbirth from which relational questions pertaining to transience, permanency, and mortality are explored. The pivotal moment that greatly influenced the work occurred after the birth of her daughter when Buckman was told that a defect in her placenta could have nearly killed her unborn child. By plastinating her placenta, with the help from the Institute for Plastination (IfP).  and later incasing it in marble, Buckman exposes the inherent and volatile dualism of this organ: of its life giving properties and polarized ability to permanently extinguish. The ephemerality of the placenta is thus where the theme and from which subsequent works in this series originate." In an interview with [artnet News] artist said, “I wanted to try and freeze that moment when something living begins to die. This was all part of having the baby and then starting to think about death, and how my child is going to die, and I am going to die.” Present Life was shown in its entirety for the artist's first solo gallery exhibition at Garis & Hahn Gallery, which opened February 24th, 2015. The series and show included a sound installation; photographs; neons; sculpture in marble, concrete, and glass; and embroidered lace.

EVERY CURVE
Buckman's ongoing body of work, EVERY CURVE, explores the contradictory and complimentary influences of Feminism and Hip-Hop in her upbringing. Working with vintage lingerie reveals the artist's fascination with femininity throughout history. Such antique undergarments, which serve as relics of the past and reminders of historical cultural ideas of female objectification, are manipulated by adding musical text from a very specific time and place. Buckman hand-embroiders the vintage lingerie with lyrics that refer to women from iconic rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. The embroidered text spans from the violent and misogynistic to the wholly sympathetic and pro-choice. This juxtaposition is witty in its provocation and empowered awareness while comparing the Janus-faced relationship between feminism and hip-hop both in the 90's and today.

Present Life
Images can also be found at Garis & Hahn's website.