Graduated from Slade School of Fine Art
Selected by Rona Smith
Book Concerto in one Act: for 90 Penguins, 2008
Artist statement
The topography of language, of music (and sound) and of our systems of classification and definitions surrounding these landscapes reflects a pertinent and fundamental set of concerns underpinning my interdisciplinary fine art practice.
Through a particular process that carefully interweaves what is already there, I seek to accentuate, isolate and question the ephemeral, integral and changing qualities of 'being', by further elucidating 'what is'.
In carefully interweaving elements of translation, notation and of site (site-cite-sight), dictums disappear, edifices re-appear. Greater freedom of improvisation is displayed, beginnings re-begun. The refrained refrain syncopates the present-absent parentheses, least irreducible of what they contain.
A miniscule lens entices infinite possibilities.
My search is for a 'paper language', a language 'en pointillé', for it is never definite but always tangled in a reel of play, of change, of recycling and of renewal. This I negotiate as a practitioner, sculpturally, musically, linguistically and performatively. By presenting an investigation into language's construction, meaning, materiality and choreography, I seek a far more soluble being, always on the verge of becoming. Its very definition expanded, renegotiated and challenged.
The work revels in an act of play, its locution, material for consideration. The question specifically seeks 'what is'. To invent by re-creating.
Selector text
Blockading the central staircase of the Slade MA show, ninety performers stand in a cluster, each engaged in reading a different page from Jorge Luis Borges' short story, The Book Of Sand. 'Conducted' by the artist, the only sound heard is the simultaneous turning of each participant's respective page. Clark is interested in the capacity for language to be expressed through different mediums and consequently acquire new meanings. Here, attention is drawn away from the narrative within the book to focus on the viewer's interaction with the readers themselves, who influence visitors to the exhibition with their quietly intrusive presence. Whether we are familiar with the novel or not, the words are left to the viewer's imagination and the artist 'lets go' of the responsibility to communicate the original text.
This giving up of control is apparent in another work presented for the MA show, 'Choon', in which journalists for The Guardian and Art World magazine as well as presenters from Resonance fm were invited to include the verb 'to choon' in an article or broadcast. According to Clark's definition, to choon is to tune or untune. The verb can be seen as a process that describes the slippage of a familiar word into a mutated state, and thus comments on the natural evolution of language whereby both the articulation and the meaning of words shift over time. The work takes a tiny step in triggering a chain of potential metamorphoses in which the word may be further tuned or re-tuned if it were to circulate in everyday conversation.
The project is documented simply with copies of the texts, a definition of the word and photocopies of emails between the artist and participants in the project. The work begins to happen, however, beyond the artist's influence and outside the gallery space.
(Rona Smith, 2008)
Qualifications and training
- 2008 MA Fine Art (Media), Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London (Distinction)
- 2005 BA (Hons) Fine Art and History of Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London, (First Class)
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