Angela was nominated for the Daimler Chrysler Award for Creative Photography for her work of 'Where's Nikki?'. Angela, mother of a disabled child, Nikki, wanted to show the world what all parents of disabled children go through. She goes into their lives and exposes that which is not spoken about.
In Buckland’s photograph series, “Where’s Nikki”, we are taken on a journey through Buckland’s emotional responses to six families dealing with their disabled child. Buckland, mother herself of a disabled son, named the piece after him. Nikki has a tendency to run away.
The artwork consists of seven 4m long vertical panels (each panel just over a meter wide) spaced out over 11m. Each panel contains five square photographs and portray an emotion Buckland wants us to focus on: shock, grief & loss, rage, confusion, relief, acceptance and hope. The verticality of the prints is intended to stimulate the narrative potential in the images (McDougall, Swartz, & van der Merwe, 2006:29) rather than an entire picture as a whole.
But seeing the artwork for the first time, one’s eyes tend to jump around, scanning over everything, intensifying views, trying to take everything in. In that moment the eyes are functioning in the exact same way when searching for something, searching for Nikki perhaps? Only after focusing on one picture at a time is it noted that most of the photographs are blurred, smudge or of an object in motion, emphasizing the searching action.
These notions can also be viewed as the emotions that are gone through when searching for somebody who has gone lost. Due to the size of the images, the portraits are very prominent and can be quite intimidating, forcing one to deal with the emotions exposed.
Buckland cunningly portray seven different emotions experienced when dealing with a family of a disable child but still manages to articulate common experiences that are share with their different children (McDougall, et al. 2006:29).
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