In a new video from Lamka Films, Ben Wiedel-Kaufmann interviews artist John Bunker about his work on the occasion of two recent London exhibitions: Six Fugues, curated by Sam Cornish at Westminster Reference Library and Ram Raiders, Snake Charmers and Rope Burns at Unit3 Projects.
Bunker comments that collage
“tends to be driven, historically, as… a domestic thing, a personalized thing… There’s that side to it. And then of course you have the other side to it, which is the side I’m more attracted to, which is this intense relationship to the picture plane – that you’re breaking it up, you’re inverting things, you’re turning things ’round.. these different speeds of attack that come into a work. You isolate a gestural piece of painting. You take it away from the happy places it’s always lived and you put it somewhere that it doesn’t belong automatically. But, then you find these new relationships between these… incongruous things.”
“For me [the work] has to be a visual, sensuous experience before anything else. But, I find that sensuousness from the materials around me and I’m determined to bring them into a relationship with the picture plane, with paint, with the history of painting.”