'In his latest works Buck has continued the move away from the ‘super-realism’ of his early career that culminated in pieces of astonishing serenity and magical presence at the turn of the millennium in the Intimate Connections series. The keynote of the latter work was a reduction of formal complexity, such that the thing in the world to which each piece referred could be named, but from which detail and all visually distracting excrescence had been expunged. Once again a human head on which a bird perches, significantly titled Go-Between provided a kind of transition and guide into sculptures that embody states of being, or physical-emotional conditions rather than being merely descriptive. For example, fecundity in Natura, unself-conscious aggressivity in Hawk, or the eternal tension between shared identity and otherness that occurs in the moment of recognition in Back to Back. Faced with this work at times I am reminded of certain African and Oceanic sculptures, of Etruscan figures, and – perhaps more unexpectedly – of the Neolithic temples of Malta and the small number of surviving artefacts unearthed in archaeological excavations there.'

Extract from introduction by Colin Rhodes
September 2005