Tom Butler – I Became a Room

In lockdown, I became a room. I grew floors and walls, and sometimes ceilings. Mostly, I was a corner. People stood, ghosts floated, mice nibbled, and peepholes formed. Sometimes my walls and floors broke apart: wood splintered, joists groaned, and screws came loose.

These drawings explore the interiority that was part and parcel of the time they were made—in lockdown. These interiors—both from memory and imagined—brought my feelings of solitude and uncertainty to eerie and uncanny “life.” Unsure what to make but knowing I had to make something, I started drawing empty rooms, lots of empty rooms. I worked on them compulsively, daily, with little understanding of what I was doing except for the catharsis they gave me and the knowledge that I had to keep making them. I worked in our small guest room on a tiny pink Victorian vanity with red pencil and ink, and sketchbook paper. I made over four hundred of them, of which eighty or so will be shown at Sarah Bouchard Gallery, finally framed and finished, from mid-August.

Looking back, four years after the series finished, I have a better understanding of these drawings—these rooms—as an odd kind of self-portrait. They provided space for my cluttered thoughts and somewhere to locate my anxieties for the future. For this reason, the rooms are purposefully incomplete and off-kilter: fissures bisect walls, voids puncture floors, a figure is seen hiding, and I realize I was doing what everyone else was doing: processing trauma. I was an ocean away from my mum and dad, my brother’s family, and our friends. On top of this, my dad’s dementia was getting worse, and I didn’t know if I was ever going to see him again. I now recognize how the loss of my father’s memory and the man himself permeated my thoughts.

The meaning of the drawings became clearer still when, last year, I returned to London. I was there to help my mum clear out her house—she was downsizing. I eventually lost my father, and she was moving to live closer to my brother in the Midlands. Because I now live in the States, I had to radically confront my pre-move life stashed in the attic and downsize it into something that could fit into a suitcase: toys, letters, everything. My wife and I sat in my childhood bedroom as I went through thousands of old photos I’d taken in my youth—all my travels, all the parties I attended. Our mission was simple: keep it, or rip it up and toss it. Thousands of photographs later, we realized I was hardly in any of them, and in fact, with many of the people who were, I couldn’t remember their names or why I took their picture. Most of them we ripped up. “You were hiding behind the camera,” my wife informed me, “that was your way of being in the room.”

The rooms I became are now changing. The emptiness of these earlier drawings and now the absence of my old photographs has presented me with profound spaciousness, and I find myself wanting to occupy this space again. Found Photographs is an ongoing series begun immediately after I filed the drawings away. The series consists of hundreds of photographs of me as an anonymous other, performing for the camera in varying forms of action and inaction, dress and undress, in a location undisclosed. Much like the shoe boxes and straw baskets of thrift stores, overflowing with orphaned images of unnamable people, I have created my own box of found photographs as a detached means of self-expression. Using only my basement and my darkroom, I’m re-occupying the void.

Central to my practice is the premise that hiding is essentially performative, something, as an introvert, I have done my whole life. Lately, the impulse to burrow myself away has returned. Naturally, it’s okay to burrow; we all need shelter and safety, but it’s not particularly productive for an artist, so I find myself looking for ways to transform my hiding into something that can be seen. I don’t think I’m alone using this paradoxical means of expression, especially when viewed as a coping strategy. In fact, I think we all wear masks or costumes of some sort in our daily lives, whether it’s a grey suit on the subway or an outrageous outfit in a nightclub; the ways we hide can reveal aspects of our most authentic selves.

Now we have entered another stage of profound uncertainty, and I feel that creeping sense of anxiety returning, albeit with a different shape. Once again, the rooms of my mind feel precious and charged, if cracked and faded a little at the edges, but still resoundingly safe. It feels more challenging than ever to make work which feels authentic, yet it has never been more vital. My Drawing Rooms and Found Photographs allow me to burrow into these corners of my imagination as well as my very real basement studio and darkroom. Both are safe spaces in their own right, vital for me to creatively bear witness to otherwise unseen parts of myself, both interior and exterior.