----Cross a madcap Katherine Hepburn with the elegance of socialite Babe Paley and you've got the thoroughly mod Mary Buck. Tall and whippet-thin, she talks a fast mile. She goes frothy with enthusiasm over a memory of shooting guns with the late author William S. Burroughs---this while fitting a silver crown on my head. Yes, a crown, as in queen. "That is THE ONE for you," Buck tells me. She tilts the circlet, studded with amethysts, a few centimeters. "Look at it from the back." ----She hands me a mirror of embossed sterling silver weighing about two pounds. A flamepoint Siamese named Braveheart yawns from the couch. "I'll try on the cat crown," Buck says, donning a tight weave of gilded wire dripping with crystals, with ear points in the front that are, indeed, distinctively feline. ----Giggling like Thelma and Louise, we're about to conduct an interview, now that we're both regally accessorized. Maybe it's sleep deprivation---I got off a plane only eight hours ago---or all that beet juice I drank in southern California, but I'm thrilling over the magnificent obsessions of this captivating Holly Golightly. She is garbed, gorgeously, in a daffy cross of Western wear and couture: khakis and a cowboy shirt veering slightly off pink, bronze ballerina slippers with heels. and not a daub of makeup. ----We are surrounded, in her Railyard District house, by the stuff of Buck's creative illness, the phrase Carl Jung gave to life-healing work motivated by a sense of play. Eight years ago, after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Buck spent six weeks in bed immobilized on her right side and being treated with steroids. That was when she made her first crown, fashioning it out of the stuff of her Minnesota childhood. "It was chicken wire," she grins, "but I prefer to call it FENCE wire." ----She remembers getting, as a girl, an Easter basket in which her grandmother had substituted coils of telephone wire for green cellophane grass. The loopy gift was clearly inspirational. Now, decades later, in this spare house dotted with long couches and silk pillows, Buck's wire sculptures---crowns, baskets that look like bonnets the Mad Hatter might wear, and octopus forms that double as giant starfish---encircle or drape every visible surface. ----Art is clearly medicine for this woman, who, until she got sick was a gallery director constantly on the go. Buck ran Santa Fe's now-defunct Sena Gallery from 1986 to 1993, and to her first show invited the contemporary sculptor Lynda Benglis (famous for her naked portrait in an Artforum ad, wearing a strap-on). She had Dennis Hopper and Burroughs make a collaborative exhibit that combined Hopper's paintings of L.A. gangs the Crips and the Bloods with Burroughs's images of himself with a shotgun, called "Seven Deadly Sins." On the walls of Buck's home is HER art history: a 1990 portrait of her, laughing, by the flamboyant British Pop artist David Hockney, and a collaborative piece she made during target practice with Burroughs---at the house of the first successfully separated conjoined twins, in Lawrence, Kansas, no less. Burroughs signed it: "All in the kill zone, July 26 1992." ----Buck leads me into her workroom, in which a giant mirrored lamp sings of Studio 54 and the Disco Inferno ear. She lifts two unfinished crowns out their bin. Beginning with up to 50 feet of material and draftsman's sense of line, she works her way by twisting, coiling, and knotting to create elaborately fashioned forms that double as sculpture and wearables. Last year, the crowns began to metamorphose into deep baskets, like swallow's nests or grottoes. An octopus, the latest form, signals her deep dive into the unconscious and almost resembles a swimmer's mask. ("Octopussy", a solo show of her latest designs, opens May 4 at Gerald Peters Gallery.) That the work emanates, in part from the darkness of illness makes it all the more stellar. ----Every night when I go to bed," Buck says, demonstrating, "I tuck my hands into the mattress under the pillow. But when I wake up they're always..." She curls five fingers to show me the painful rheumatism. For some reason, they call to mind that the works crone and crown are near-homonyms. Both snake a path into sacred imagery---the are, for Buck, hails from "a very intense place," she says. "Some days I have more energy that anybody, and other days..." She shrugs off the unsaid. If she's tired, she often packs it in at four in the afternoon. "I don't even look at fashion or art magazines anymore," she says, even though her work is in W, and New York City's fashionistas are picking them up at the West 14th Street boutique Jeffery. The rest of us are relegate to Buck's website, www.marybuckthompson.com. "My best friend says I should put up a sign at the end of my driveway: CROWNS 'N' SHIT." She tosses her head back and laughs, hard. ---- ELLEN BERKOVITCH, SANTAFEAN ---- ---- ----
------The Santafean ---------May 2006 ----All text as printed in The Santafean, written by ---- Ellen Berkovitch. ----"Clockwise from top left: Mary Buck at home, with her work; "Gold Darby Crown", made of gold wire with amethyst, citrine, carnelian, aquamarine, and pearls. 3 x 7 x 7"; "Spring Basket", German silver with Rhine flower, 30 x 18 x 18"; "Octopus #1", in which 7,000 feet of German silver wire is entwined with freshwater pearls, 12 x 30 x 26"; Braveheart, Mary's Siamese, wearing "Cat Crown", gold plate and smokey quartz." ----Cover ----Press ----Home