New Prayers - Old Religions

Words by Gareth Stevens

Portrait by Piers Golden

Artworks by Richard Butchins

I meet with Richard Butchins in his windowless studio along the nether regions of Gotham Alley. It is a bright morning and, despite the incessant shrill of impact wrenches from the team of scaffolders the seem to be besieging us, we have a productive and uncompromising conversation.

Richard’s workspace is a place of bizarre juxtapositions. Amidst the modern photographic

studio paraphernalia – the lights held aloft by skeletal stands, MacBooks, cameras – there is an almost unsettling cornucopia of curious objects. Skulls, dolls, mannequins, vases of funereal lilies and handmade bird masks intersperse the technology and begin to indicate to me a central theme of his work.

By many measures Richard is a remarkable artist. Previously a news photographer and journalist, he has worked for The Guardian and The Observer and made many award-winning documentaries which he both wrote and directed. He left school with no qualifications at all. Having an interest in art, he successfully enrolled onto a foundation course, but soon found that his disability was an ‘insurance liability’ for the college and he had to make a swift exit. Such was the exclusionary nature of educational institutions in the eighties he says.

Mildly reluctant to talk about his physical disability, Richard’s impairment is in plain sight. His left arm is atrophied, an attribute which is certified by his moniker on Instagram which is ‘thewitheredhand’. More of this later. He now realises that not only was he having to deal with discrimination to do with his disability, but was also endeavouring to navigate a world as someone who was neurodivergent.

'Card Players'

Given his early educational experiences, it may surprise you to learn that Richard was awarded a PhD by Kent University in 2023. “I sometimes think that it would be fun, in a Benjamin Button kinda way, to do an MA next – then an undergraduate degree followed by ‘A’ levels,” he tells me. "You'll end up in a sandpit someday,” I reply.

In the late 80s and early 90s Richard successfully developed a career in photojournalism and TV, regularly undertaking assignments in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. He then transitioned into being more of a TV documentary filmmaker. He has presented and directed arts and current affairs programmes for BBC One’s Panorama, Channel 4’s Dispatches and ITV’s Exposure. In his films he uses his own experiences as a disabled person to make work which addresses various forms of disability and society’s attitudes to them.

Whilst he continues to be involved in this work, he talks about the creeping sense of dissatisfaction he began to have. Whilst making one film that revealed the kinds of abuse and aggression faced by disabled people in everyday life, he was asked by the commissioning editor to make it a bit more uplifting. His response was, “No I can’t, because it's a profoundly depressing subject with no happy ending.”

He says, with some irony, that being involved in a so-called creative industry can be personally stifling. “People always tell you how it’s got to be, they want it by tomorrow, on budget and they want you to make it yellow and not green?” The growing frustration with not having singular control over his output and the enforced isolation of lockdown serendipitously led Richard to start to produce the kinds of photographs featured here.

He tells me that being virtually housebound during the pandemic led him to start taking photographs of flowers in his home.

“I’m a disabled artist and not an artist with a disability,” he asserts, “All of my art is informed by my embodied state. For me the cut flower is a powerful metaphor for disability.”

Richard was diagnosed late in life with autism and thus

confesses that he “tends to gravitate to the use of more literal metaphors. Flowers are taken out of nature and placed in the short-lived environment of a vase of water and we watch them die. In some sense all disabled people live in a transparent bell jar. My work is not explicitly about my disability, but inescapably it is thoroughly informed by it.”

Richard’s diagnosis of being neurodivergent (he has ADHD too) legitimised his place in the world, he tells me. “As a teenager I didn’t realise I was navigating a world where being forthright in your views was frowned upon, a world in which I felt I didn't fit. Now I have a kind of compass, I understand now that the perennial feelings I had of being a failure, were just not true”.

The current work is testimony to Richard wanting to be totally in control of each stage of his creative process. “I bring influences from Vanitas paintings and the still life tradition into my photographic works,” he says. Meticulously composed compositions of natural and artificial objects create dark tableaus of the human condition. Always using the lens of disability, he conveys contemporary narratives of universal themes such as life, death, decay, and melancholy and in doing so unearths hidden narratives around disability and neurodivergence that have existed throughout the history of western art.

So different from street photography, the work is the antithesis of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the ‘decisive moment’. As Richard says, “I plan that moment very precisely”.

In ‘Mother and Child’ (above) Richard reflects on the trope of the contemporary single mother and poetically juxtaposes it with the idea of the virgin birth itself. This work blends the sublime and the prosaic. It is a meld of profound arcane ‘myths’ in an age of absurdity. Taken in a disused convent in St Leonards, this photograph… yes it is a single shot, ‘painted’ expertly by well placed lights and with little or no post-production… shows a young woman dressed as Mary looking upward in rapture whilst mindlessly pointing at her smartphone. Richard explains to me how he thinks our phones have become our new “devotional objects – our replacement altars”. He goes on to lament how our spiritual faith has now been undermined by capitalism and our desire for material goods. The way that the pushchair holding the child (Jesus?) is slightly upended, one wheel clearly hovering above the floor, unsettles us as does the Star of David on the baby’s garment.

Richard describes ‘Flowers Dreaming of…’ (below) as a “Modern Vanitas about the fleeting nature of life and our electrical goods”. He further says that this work tells of however much “we set ourselves up as overlords of nature, strings of proteins can lock us in our homes and wreak havoc with our flimsy society”. The work is full of delectable detail and should be viewed full scale and face to face.

‘Memories of Lost Lives’ (above) is a shrine to memories of past lives and memories. Old black and white photographs intermingle with vases of flowers, candles and other objects. Like the blooms, the photographs will slowly fade and degrade. Of this work Richard says, “we have forgotten the importance of the meanings of photographs because they have become ubiquitous in the digital age”. The wonderful and archaic chiaroscuro of this piece infuses it with a sense of longing and melancholy for the loss of profundity we face in the 21st century.

I strongly encourage you to try and see these deeply moving artworks at the upcoming exhibition at The BlackShed Gallery later in the summer. To see such poetic nuance and technical craft put together at the same time is a real rarity.

Richard’s work will be exhibited at The BlackShed from the 30th August until 27th September

richardbutchins.art

theblackshedgallery.org.uk