Zoë Buckman’s Choreography of Care at YveYang Gallery

Zoë Buckman, Drank words from her fingers, 2021 Boxing gloves, vintage textile and chain, 31 x 9 x 8 in. Image courtesy of YveYang Gallery.
 

Zoë Buckman
YveYANG Gallery

By AnnaLiisa Benston April 22, 2025

Before heading to the gallery, I stopped at a corner wine shop and grabbed a couple bottles—something crisp and light to carry us through the evening. When Zoë arrived her eyes were bright and lively. “You brought wine?” she smiled, genuinely delighted. The energy shifted immediately. Not formal. Not transactional. Just two women showing up for each other.

We poured glasses and wandered into the work together. She didn’t lecture. She didn’t perform. She let the pieces speak—and when they didn’t, we sat with the silence. Our conversation wasn’t scripted. It was generous. Attentive. Full of that rare kind of ease where you don’t need to say much to feel understood. That’s what the show holds too. Space. Softness. The kind of strength that doesn’t have to announce itself.

Benston and Buckman in front of "Slow dancing with white embossed ovals through my veins" 2020 Vintagetextile, collage, ink on paper, 13 x 18 1/2 in. Photo credit: Michael Jung
 

Zoë Buckman’s latest exhibition at YveYang doesn’t ask for attention—it earns it, slowly. It’s a show that hovers, stitched with tension, full of bruises and breath. Her boxing gloves don’t throw punches. They reach. They lift. They remember. In a time where everything feels like a fight, Buckman offers something else entirely: a choreography of care.

Across the gallery, objects hang in midair—floral 70s boxing gloves, vintage ribbons, swatches of upholstery. You walk in expecting conflict. You leave having witnessed intimacy.

Buckman’s materials carry weight long before they become art. Thick 1970s couch fabric—designed for utility and built to last—wraps her sculptural gloves. The kind of fabric that lived in family rooms, bore the imprint of generations. “Everything I use already has a life,” she told me. “A charge.” She doesn’t disguise the domestic. She elevates it.

 It Stings, 2019, hand embroidery on vintage textile framed, 13 x 16 ⅞ in. Image courtesy of YveYang Gallery.
 

In "Drank words from her fingers", the show’s quiet centerpiece, two boxing gloves face each other. But instead of colliding, one holds the other—gently, mid-fall. The space between them is filled with that same vintage upholstery, suspended. One glove dangles on its own. The other is anchored by a chain wrapped in ballet-green grosgrain ribbon—soft, iconic, surprisingly strong.

“It’s soft and strong at the same time,” Buckman said. “It’s strength in disguise."

 Slow dancing with white embossed ovals through my veins, 2020, vintage textile, collage, ink on paper, 13 x 18 ½ in. Image courtesy of YveYang Gallery.
 

That’s what this show offers: strength in disguise. Not spectacle. Not pain as a headline. But presence. Attention. A different kind of power. These are not objects performing vulnerability. They are surviving it.

Her poem Show Me Your Bruises, Then is stitched into the work like a pulse. Inspired by her late mother’s journals, the phrase appears again and again: embroidered on handkerchiefs, scrawled in pencil, left half-finished.

“I started writing to her… then with her.”

The thread becomes a ritual. The repetition, a kind of prayer. The loose ends aren’t unresolved—they’re honest.

 Buckman with Founder Yve Yang in front of "Under hushed tones", 2024, Hand embroidery, ink, acrylic, on vintage textiles, 37 x 19 ½ in. Photo credit: Michael Jung

This isn’t about trauma. It’s about what we do after. It’s about staying. Holding. Returning. One glove helps the other. That’s the metaphor. That’s the truth.

Buckman’s materials don’t decorate. They witness. The grosgrain doesn’t soften the chain—it redefines it. The vintage fabric doesn’t whisper nostalgia—it speaks of function, endurance, and transformation.

There’s no big moment in the show. No climax. Just tension held with care. Grief stitched with clarity. One woman’s story woven into the furniture of our collective lives.

Zoë Buckman isn’t asking you to look at her bruises. She’s showing you what it means to carry them with grace—and to hold someone else’s before they fall.

It’s not a depiction of combat. It’s a choreography of care.

And it begs us to wake up. WM

—

This work is part of Sehnsucht (Longing) a group show curated by Yve Yang and Stavroula Coulianidis. 

YveYANG Gallery

12 Wooster Street 

03.07 – 04.26.2025

Zoë Buckman (b. 1985, London, UK) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She is currently included in Get in the Game, a group exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, later travelling to Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AR; and Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing, Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; and Daffodils Baptized In Butter, The Arts Club, London. Her work can be found in the collections of National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA.