What lies beneath the surface of an apparently innocuous domestic environment? For Anne Buckwalter, an environment littered with the routines of its inhabitants is rich in intimate code. In her paintings, nothing is quite as it seems. Flattened perspectives skew traditional proportions, intertwining a fantastical element throughout considerations of queerness and sexuality in a happy marriage of mundanity and lust.
Interior spaces are synonymous with psychological spaces for Buckwalter, who draws on American folk art and Pennsylvania Dutch traditions – the latter a nod to her upbringing in rural Pennsylvania – for her richly drawn interiors. Look closer, and you spot the subversive details of a private life, in the blood stain on a mattress, the whip in the laundry room or the grass stains on knees.
‘I situate disparate objects together as a way of representing how we embody feelings, values, and desires that can be seen as incompatible with each other,’ Buckwalter says. ‘I’m particularly interested in how this relates to sexuality; I like to create spaces for lust and eroticism to exist alongside the mundane, hygienic, and wholesome. I think culturally we are conditioned to gravitate towards that which is binary or straightforward – we don’t have a lot of innate patience or compassion for murky grey areas. But I think it’s a universally and fundamentally human thing to be complicated, changeable, and ambivalent, and I feel compelled to embrace that in my work...’
Hannah Silver
