Re-interpretations: a sequence of drawings derived from historical works in public and corporate collections.

‘Re-intepretations’ is a sequence of drawings that examine the ‘significance of making’ by an earlier artist or artisan and this relationship to the act of making now, in quite different social and cultural contexts. The series originally developed from an invitation to participate in the ING ‘re:MAKING’ exhibition (2004), that posed the question of how the act of making or observation by a previous artist can inform the practice of a contemporary artist, in a meaningful and significant way. This research theme has subsequently developed as the point of departure for Bugg’s practice, with drawings from these enquiries exhibited in ’Re:INVENTING’, ING, London and the National Maritime Museum, London (curator, Eileen Hogan, 2006-07); ‘The Ghandi Group’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile (2006); and ‘Drawing from Turner’ at Tate Britain (curator, Stephen Farthing, 2006-07).

In 2006, working with Gerrit Pompe’s ‘Shipping off a Dutch Harbour’ (1680), the interpretation developed into a concern with an apparently trivial incident in the painting, the repair of a ship’s sail, and the potential histories of that incident, real and imagined. Turner’s drawing, ‘Coutances’ (1826), then provided the inspiration to develop drawings based on Turner’s working process of folding paper and drawing throughout the duration of a journey. This construction of a single work from four, sometimes inverted, images was explored in a series of contemporary landscapes depicting Bugg’s own journeys, the common theme linking the selection of the interpeted works.

The drawing from Turner’s ‘Coutances’ is in The Centre for Drawing Archive, UAL; a drawing from the Pompe painting is in a private collection in Amsterdam. Work from this series will now be exhibited in solo exhibitions at the SACI Gallery, Florence and the Robert Morris Gallrery, Pittsburgh in 2008.

Bugg's creativity expresses itself in an indirect dialogue between his paper-based drawings and his three-dimensional pieces for wall and floor. Beneath their apparent quietude, his installations present an underlying challenge to the conventions of the gallery space itself, activating areas which are normally mute and unregarded, suggesting connections and relationships which shift the viewer's understanding of the voids and solids which populate the room.

The elements which make up Bugg's work speak with dislocated voices. The circular wall components are baked in a ceramicist's oven rather than constructed from materials more usually found in a sculptor's studio; their slim forms are no thicker than a canvas on a stretcher, yet the eye reads them as three dimensional; each is a unique entity positioned in its own field, yet Bugg deploys them to deliver unity. He mixes languages - the hollows of the small-scale thinly-walled vessels which he places in sudden groups echo with references quite different from those of the glazed discus shapes which float somewhere between flight and fixity across his walls and floors. He plays games with weight, with texture, with abstraction and geometry, and - by inference - with invisibility as well as the visible, suggesting coherence within a framework that denies overt order. Just as each component carries its own delicately achieved surface variation, so the whole is finely controlled to embrace disruption and stillness, rhythm and break, primitivism and sophistication, energy and latency.