Elke Bucher is a visual and performance artist based in Glasgow. After completing a degree in translation studies and working as a science translator for a few years, she decided, when lockdown was coming to an end, to follow her love for visual art and dancing and to dedicate herself fully to it. Also a dancer, Elke has worked as a freelance creative for almost two years, participated in exhibitions (Glasgow, Moscow, Vienna) and organised affordable visual art projects for the Glasgow dancer community through self-funding. Through her movement-based work, Elke seeks to translate sound to movement for photography, videography and performance purposes and to teach others to use their bodies as a tool to create movement - life, really. For this coming year, Elke plans on working on an analogue photography series on textures and on entering further dance competitions.
Elke Bucher's love of remote, rugged landscapes have led her from tiny wooden shacks of the Caribbean to the wide steppes of Kazakhstan, from ice-cold hail storms on the Faroes to the arid plateaus of Armenia. Never afraid of a challenge outdoors, she has encountered bears, pneumonia, heat stroke and eye scratches (due to a nasty grain of hail!) but keeps spending time outdoors. She considers walking and dancing a form of meditation and makes this a regular practice. Years of travelling, especially hitchhiking and staying with locals for extended periods of time, have given her a sense of belonging and connectedness in a variety of different environments, which she tries to document on her old Nikon FE film camera and on her phone. The sea, particularly, keeps calling her back and helps her connect with people and process her life experiences. Her main series to date, 'Seascapes', tries to create a reflection on belonging, more than to a place or a country, and to find comfort in both the roaring waves and the gentle ripple.