Bio
| Bio |
| Graham Bury My artwork, whether large or small, meticulously made by hand or printed with lasers on traditional photographic paper, is always made with one intent: to tell a complicated story. While I am interested in the stories of the people or environments that I am depicting, I also see the process itself as a story. That is why I often use antiquated printing techniques. When I produce a cyanotype, for example, I am aware that one hundred and seventy years ago Anna Atkins first used cyanotypes for specimen documentation in botanical fieldwork and that later on these same chemical mixtures were used to produce blueprints, and that blueprints are the starting point for all great man-made structures. I admire the eighteenth and nineteenth century explorers and naturalists, plant collectors and biologists, who wandered the earth and documented what they saw. In that same spirit, although I do not concern myself with documenting plant species, finches or fish, I would like to believe that what I do is in some way carrying on that tradition. When I travel abroad I like to imagine that I’m on an expedition. Whether in the Andes, in the streets of Beijing, or on an island off Borneo, I am a collector with a camera. As a photographer and artist, I am often drawn to subject matter that expresses entropy, whether it be construction projects or deciduous and dormant plants, as in my Beijing series. I search for fractal patterns in nature and in design. More simply, I am attracted to repetition and the concept of scale. If I have a dominant theme, it is patterns and geometry juxtaposed with entropy and controlled chaos. My work has been shown at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and at the Off Axis Art Festival. |
 |