About

David Buckland – Lens-based artist, Film director & producer, Curator, Founder & Director, Cape Farewell

His work is included in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Michael Wilson Collection, London and the Metropolitan Museum of New York. Buckland curated ‘eARTh’ for the Royal Academy 2009, U-n-f-o-l-d for Cape Farewell 2010, and Carbon 12 for Paris 2012, Carbon 13 for the Ballroom, Marfa Texas 2012, London 2009. He produced the films ‘Art from the Arctic’ 2006 for the BBC and ‘Burning Ice’ for Sundance, 2010.

Buckland works to enable events to be created, performed and then recorded through lens-based technology. The recorded information is then transformed and manifested through process to have the physicality and emotional presence of a tactile object.

The focus of enquiry is embedded in what we touch, intellectually and physically. This is manifest through scientific and economic enquiry, emotional knowledge and a liquid sense of modernism.


Creator and Director of Cape Farewell, 2001 – 

Buckland created and now directs the international Cape Farewell project – www.capefarewell.com. Bringing artists, visionaries, scientists and educators together, Cape Farewell continues to build an international collective awareness and the cultural response to climate disruption. Over 140 artists have created operas, films, artworks, pop music and novels which address the climate challenge and through the process of making art, vision a sustainable and exciting cultural future.

He created the Cape Farewell project to mirror the mathematical modellers’ interrogation of future time. To address climate means we have to act now in order to achieve a result decades into the future, this is counter to accepted practice as humanity to date has only had to address problems of the present. For climate scientists, the projected consequences of inaction are unimaginable, our habitat and humanity would suffer greatly if we don’t act. The challenge is to accept the future truth of climatic change and importantly position it as a cultural responsibility. It is our evolved action, our feverish human activity that is causing the planet to warm. To embrace a cultural shift as the necessary part of the solution requires the creative community to help vision the new and for art practice to inhabit reality on a different plane.

To perform an expedition is an action based enquiry, a research enquiry through the process of doing. It is possible, through art practice aligned to action based research, to know future demands with some sense of exactitude, in the same way as mathematical modelling sets a paradigm to map future realities.