JOHN BAUCHER
interview with a vaulter
April 2020
This sunny Saturday brings us another Interview with a Vaulter with John Baucher
How is it going?
All things considered....well. There are obvious frustrations but with the end option being what it is.....i’m doing ok. The only thing you’ll hear me complain about is the perennial of dog shite and folks not having the spatial awareness to understand just how far 6 f@*ken feet is! Oh and 5g Conspiracists.
What is your living condition? Do you have outside space or are you living in an underground bunker?
I live on my own and have a very small front “garden” which gets the sun in the morning so I can sit out with a coffee and a book. Which is nice. I can’t hang my hammock unfortunately. If one thing has become clear to me, it is that I need a new sofa and soft furnishings. Has that DFS closing down sale finally finished?
How has the pandemic affected your practice? How Are you coping with the closure of the vault? How do you imagine the future after lockdown? For yourself and the wider artistic community?
Prior to being invited to join The Vault I worked from home in my cluttered front room. I haven’t had a studio per se for 20 years so I have re-acclimated myself to be back here working in splendid isolation, albeit it a slightly less cluttered space than before.
As a photographer documenting the mundane, “recording the present for the future” all I really need are good shoes, a camera and my wits about me when I’m out moochin. And a laptop and hard drive at home obviously. In more recent years I have been exploring assemblages using found, gifted or retrieved flags (amongst other things). This sculptural element happened naturally and feels like a progression of my practice and areas of interest. As an autodidact I’m learning at a pace I’m comfortable with I guess.
My Studio at the Vault (2nd floor Rm 32 for future reference) gives me the space to make work and leave it to gestate, to just to be. I have to like it first before anyone else gets a chance. I do miss folks swinging by the studio and bouncing (mad?) ideas off them. I miss that and the quick run downs to the kitchen after a coffee alert on the fb group page. And the pool games and the echoing stairwells and the sticky front door and. F*Ck it i miss the damn place alright!
I didn’t really do much writing or work for the first 3 weeks of all this but didn’t fret or worry about that at all. I’ve been working on a project for a couple of years and was due to exhibit it at Ps2 at the end of May. Obviously this exhibition “Flowers from the East” has been postponed. One good thing about that...it means I can document, collect and press more flowers this summer. One theme of the exhibition is resilience so hopefully there will be a proliferation of wildflowers due the councils not spraying. So whilst the exhibition is on hold the work does continue.
I mentioned progression in my work and this is very much at the forefront of my mind regarding the future. I already had plans,ideas and sketches for some filmed work and I envisage this will become my main goal, to realise them from the pages of my notebooks to pixels to screen. Watch this space.
Naturally I have been trying to imagine a future beyond this lockdown. I think it’s safe to say that this year is a write off. I suspect that there will be another lockdown perhaps 2 before the end of the year. I hope I'm wrong. I’m an optimist, I mean if we haven’t got hope what have we got? I’m trying to be realistic. I think that whilst this is a global health crisis, locally we can effect some change. It’s an opportunity to reset and perhaps change directions especially in our relationship with cars/transport and the urban built environment. I’d love to see more pedestrianisation of the city centre and there looks to be moves towards that. Fingers crossed. We cannot continue sleepwalking as our built heritage is consumed by rapacious developers. Now more than ever we need to be vigilant.
We are already seeing a tsunami of online filmed content, some good, some bad and some worse. The challenge is to make the work interesting, visually arresting and delivered, if possible, in a way to get beyond the mundane. It’s a challenge. Social distancing is going to make public exhibitions difficult. In short I haven’t a baldy notion as to what the future holds for us.
I’m going to quote Seamus Heaney to finish -
“Noli Timere” Don’t be afraid.