In Aqueous, Alex Buckingham approaches water not as subject, but as shifting presence. Surface and depth collapse; reflections fracture form. Light becomes unstable — fluid, momentary, difficult to hold.

These works resist description. Hovering between abstraction and recognition, they foreground perception itself: how light alters space, how form dissolves, and how meaning shifts from one instant to the next.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Water refuses to stay still.

What draws me to it is its constant change — how light, wind and movement alter everything in an instant. I am not trying to define water, but to respond to it.

Reflections distort reality. Edges soften. The familiar becomes abstract. Often the image exists only briefly before it disappears again.

This series is an invitation to slow down and look beyond the surface — to sit with uncertainty rather than resolve it.

— Alex Buckingham

CREDITS

Artist
Alex Buckingham

Exhibition
Online Viewing Room, Aqueous, Maud Gallery, 2020.

Medium
Archival pigment prints

Enquiries
Pricing and availability on request via Maud Gallery. Please quote the artwork title.

CURATORIAL NOTE

Aqueous aligns with Maud Gallery’s commitment to concept-driven photographic practice, where material investigation and perceptual inquiry intersect. In this series, water becomes both medium and metaphor — a site where photographic description gives way to instability and transformation. Buckingham’s approach foregrounds the mechanics of seeing. Through shifts in light, refraction and surface tension, the camera records not fixed objects but transient states. Reflection and distortion disrupt spatial certainty, inviting the viewer to question where form begins and dissolves. Rather than framing water as landscape or spectacle, Aqueous positions it as a dynamic field — one that mirrors photography’s own capacity to hold, fracture and suspend time. The series asks not what water is, but how it behaves under observation, and how perception itself remains fluid.