The RWA Candidates Exhibition / Bristol 2026

‘The Buckenham Reliquary’ - Duncan Cameron / RWA Candidates Show 2026.

This is a work about loss, the loss of the wild.
The cabinet speaks to the faunal attrition around us and the many animals killed along the rail lines that bisect the UK countryside. This work takes the form of a portable house shaped reliquary and contains the ordered and displayed bones found on a 1 mile walk along the side of a section of railway line through Norfolk fields and marshes. These often un-noticed and unremarked relics litter the margins of our lived experience but when framed and presented can be seen to represent something of the huge rolling loss of wild creatures that litter our day-to-day human comings and goings. These relics of the wild, evidence of the rail side losses in the form of the dried white bones, are framed in this gilded ossuary and are now protected, raised and seen.

The work speaks to loss, through the collection of relics. The bones arranged here not only bear witness to the impact of our human activities on the wild, and the literal impact of a fast train moving through the marshland wildlife, but also to the impact of our manipulation of the land. These farmed landscapes are over populated by bird species bred as game and amongst the rat, deer and rabbit bones presented here are the many skulls of pheasant and partridge and then the bones of vulnerable raptors that feed on the rail side carrion.

This new work builds on a history of sculptural cabinet artworks, an ongoing and novel enquiry that deploys historical models of display to speak to contemporary ecological concerns, in this case anthropogenic impacts on nature and the environment. This material device here containing a prescribed collection of ethically retrieved animal bones - provides a lens through which to frame new insights into the impact and volume of faunal attrition alongside the country’s railway lines.

Effectively Shared: After being shortlisted, this new work (‘The Buckenham Reliquary’ September 2026) was a key piece in a selection of 4 works that were presented as part of my Bristol RWA 2026 academician candidates’ exhibition – 2x Working Drawings and 2 x sculptures. (12th September to 18th October 2026) - The shortlisted artists and the artworks presented were voted on by current RWA artists/peers - and on 1st November 2026 I was successfully invited to become an RWA Academician and having accepted am now entitled to use the RWA post nominals after my name.