ARTIST STATEMENT

Don’t Show This to Anybody

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