Wetlands (Notes on Beverly Buchanan's submerged sculptures)
Amelia Groom
Beverly Buchanan’s “Marsh Ruins” (1981) partially submerged during high tide. Published in “Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins” (2021) by Amelia Groom, courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
In working with water as an open-ended sculptural force, and as a place to hide, the artist Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) effected a gradual merging of figure and ground, artistic intention and ecological contingency, object and setting, art and abandonment. This talk by Amelia Groom––author of “Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins"––will look to a number of the artist’s submerged and water-bound pieces from the late 1970s to the mid-‘80s, including her short-lived "6-piece Abandoned Sculpture” (1980), which she left to the waves on the beach behind Hamlet’s Castle in Denmark.
Amelia Groom is a Berlin-based writer and currently a postdoctoral researcher at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Laboratory for Art Research). She teaches in the Critical Studies department at the Sandberg Instituut. She has written about pareidolia, rust, lichen, gossip, photographic blurs, and the politics of silence. www.ameliagroom.com