Lucas Bullens (b. 1990) is a Swiss born artist and designer based in London, specialising in the medium of photography.
Lucas Bullens
Interested in ideas of the 'soul’ and transmigration, Lucas’ practice revolves around exploring the transcendental. Using the camera as an instrument, he seeks to extract the immaterial buried within the material. Inspired by the natural world and the boundlessness of the universe, Lucas’ work explores notions of animism and embraces non-dualist thinking. The mostly monochromatic sequences he presents are a minimalist yet intricate reflection of the world he feels around him.
Lucas works with a multiplicity of materials, however always keeping the manipulation and movement of light (photography) at the core of his practice.
A selection of works from the series Celestial Saults, 2022.
This series explores the soul as the starting point of all motion in things which live. Here, the human body is rendered to a caligraphic stroke. The blurry strokes separate the figures of their human form. Much like the figures of Étienne-Jules Marey and the deities of Eastern theology, the multiplicity of the spirit is presented within a single frame. A frame dominated by emptiness, a rectangular Śūnyatā, where emptiness is everything-ness and the subject is connected to all four corners.
Medium:
Inkjet prints on Kozo paperSize:
90 x 200cm (each)
Medium:
Inkjet print on blotter paperSize:
19 x 25.4cm
According to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, immediately following the death of an individual, consciousness will linger outside of the body for "about the time it takes to eat a meal", before continuing with its transmigration. A liminal moment within a liminal act.
The piece presented is part of an ongoing body of work and research exploring death and food and their inseparability within the cyclical nature of the natural world.
Medium:
Unique inkjet prints on handmade Khadi paperSize:
21 x 30cm (each)
The work presented, titled A Repeated Baptism by Light (Xerox), 2022, combines print photography and video performance, whereby an archival photograph of my late mother is repeatedly scanned and printed through a laser printer until the original image is (almost) completely obscured.
With its meditative repetition of machinic rumbles, the printer and I work in tandem on the transformational initiation of the image. On its immersion, purification, obscuration, and finally, its release.