Born in Alexandria, Scotland.
Based in London.
Education
Central Saint Martin’s college of art – MA Fine art. September 2009.
Duncan of Jordanstone college of art, Dundee - Bachelor of arts (Hons) Art Philosophy and Contemporary practices. June 2008
Exhibitions
2012
Tainted love Transition gallery. May
You Aren’t Anything, You Are Everything The Duchy, Glasgow. March
‘Cause I Only Have Eyes For You (solo exhibition) Telephone Booth, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. January
LONDON / BERLIN Anschlüssel, Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings. Centre For Recent
Drawing, London, January
2011
Strip, Transition gallery at Sluice Art Fair, London. October
The Modern Language Experiment presents: What is an Art Book? The Mews Project Space. September
LONDON / BERLIN Anschlüssel, Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings. Berlin. September
Pulp Fictions, Transition gallery, August
One night stand, Thistle hotel, Middlesborough. June
Mock Tudor. Transition gallery (offsite). June
O death rock me asleep. X presents, Kirsty Buchanan. (Solo show) May
Lightworks. Grimsby. March
2010
Transition shopspace presents Kirsty Buchanan. (solo show) Transition Gallery. london
Art Blitz Transition Gallery. London.
Exeter contemporary open. Exeter Pheonix, Exeter.
OYABORA. Kismet projects, Stoke Newington, London.
Real Dolls. Transition Gallery. Hackney, London.
Hand joy. The Centre for Recent drawing, Islington, London.
Social Capital Live performance and video installation. Off Modern, Corsica Studios. London.
Facebook. Patrick Heide contemporary art. 11 Church street, London.
2009
MA fine art degree show. Central Saint Martin’s college of art. CSM Charing cross road, London. http://mafacsm.com/works/kirsty-buchanan/
Central Saint Martin's MA Interim show. The Bargehouse, OXO tower, London.
/Seconds Online publishing project. http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/002/articles/csmma/articles/kbuchanan/index.php
Razz my berries.disused café, near Charing Cross station, London. www.artoutofgallery.com
2008
Duncan of Jordanstone Fine art degree show. The Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee, Scotland.
You’ve got some explaining to do. The dirty collective. Leeds, England http://youvegotsomeexplainingtodo.com/artists/kirsty-buchanan.html
The visible and the invisible. Lower foyer gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee.
2007
The Golden Hammer with Henry Coombes, Lower Foyer Gallery. Dundee.
Prizes
Exeter contemporary open 2010. Exeter Pheonix, Exeter.
Participations
2008
Active resistance to propaganda, Vivienne Westwood's manifesto. Read the part of ‘Child Slave boy’. University of Dundee.
Here now, there now. performance along railway lines in Scotland.
http://www.herenowtherenow.org/
Publications
Garageland fake and Garageland Painting Editor of Notes section
Arty #28 'zines'
Headless Queen Zines
(guest editor) To have and to hold. Issue 3
To have and to hold. Issue 2
To have and to hold. issue 1
Press
Libidinal Erasures (The Good/Bad Girl)
Alex Michon, November 2009 gallery notes
Kirsty Buchanan’s practice negotiates a shifting miasma between a performative drawing space which explores both erotic longing and the embarrassment associated with this exploration.
In a libidinal act of abandon she throws herself into the act of drawing sexual encounters (both remembered and imagined) as if throwing herself into the arms of a new lover without forethought or design. “As I draw I don’t want to be too conscious of what I am doing” she says “ I don’t want to place it too obviously on the page but just to be carried away with it. It is only later that I start to edit”
Re-enacting a teenage moment of shame when her mother found some of her drawings Buchanan then begins the act of rubbing out and “hiding” elements in the drawings, leaving behind traces and hints of the original, The resulting wonky and tentative smudged and erased lines describe the tensions between the good/bad girl dilemma, creating new readings within the work. Taking a position of neither up-front brash ‘let it all hang out’ post feminism nor ‘nicey-nicey’ shy girl, the drawings inhabit a contemporary in-between both extremes.
'The Skinny' issue 33 june 2008. page 30
'Kirsty Buchanan's video-based work similarly deserves special mention. She has created an interesting presentation, a couch and a lamp providing a cosy environ from which the viewer may observe her seven-monitor documentation of a range of couples watching a film of childbirth. The viewer does not see the film, Window, water, baby, moving by the artist Stan Brakhage merely the reactions of those witnessing it. We are thereby placed within an extended chain of voyeurism, an experience of the primal 'miracle of life' filtered through a variety of cameras, monitors, and persons to distance us from the event itself as to render us laughing aimlessly at the expressions of discomfort and occasionally horror on the filmed witnesses. Buchanan has created a tangled exploration of the gaze and the alienation caused by technology which resonates far beyond the confines of the work itself.'