The Universe Within

When I was creating my poem collage for New Year’s Eve, I was debating whether to use some different images as the background. These were also torn from a magazine (an old issue of Black Book), but I realised they were images by the artist Chris Bucklow. It seemed a bit wrong to be using another artist’s work in my own art – although I’ve seen it done before. (Australian Copyright Law does allow me to create collages using found imagery). Instead, I used a commercial photograph advertising beauty products.

Christopher Bucklow is a British photographer best known for his Guest series. Each image is unique, and is created using a technique similar to a pinhole camera. He first draws a life-sized silhouette of his sitter on a sheet of aluminium foil, which is then perforated with thousands of pinholes. Sunlight is allowed to shine through these holes, exposing photographic paper to many images of the sun and sky at once. Colour variations depend on the intensity of sunlight, the hour, and exposure time.

The results are these beautiful silhouettes – the universe within each of us.

See more of Bucklow’s work in his gallery.