Beginning with a visual idea, a collage of feeling affect, and the honest collision of experiences.
Brian Clarke, 2018.
All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else - the poetry, ideas, emotions - emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.
Brian Clarke is one of the most important artists working in stained glass. Since the early 1970s, he has collaborated with some of the world’s most prominent architects to create stained-glass designs and installations for hundreds of projects worldwide. He is also a painter of international repute, and has increasingly engaged, over the last two decades, in creating complete architectural spaces - total works of art - that integrate painting, sculpture, ceramic, glass, metalwork and mosaic.
Stained glass has been one of the most spectacular of the European arts for centuries, since its full development in the early Middle Ages. References to stained glass in England date from the 7th century, and by the 12th century it had become a sophisticated art form. The basic techniques used in medieval times have barely changed: pieces of coloured glass are held together in a framework of lead. Early stained glass was made by melting sand, potash and lime together in clay pots. It was coloured by the mixing of metallic oxides - copper for green, cobalt for blue, gold for red - and by the mid-16th century many colours were being used.
A key figure in keeping this magnificent art-form alive and relevant in modern times, Brian Clarke is at once a leader in new technology, and a brilliant aesthetic innovator. The works in this exhibition are at the very frontier of what it is possible to do with stained glass. Stained glass entered the artist’s consciousness early. As a boy, as he was just beginning to determine his commitment to art, he tells us that “I saw a stained glass window being installed in a church in Lancashire and it filled me with interest for the medium.” He went on to be a painter, but he never forgot this early experience, and by 1973, barely into his twenties, he began to work with glass.
This exhibition focuses on two bodies of work produced over recent years: his stained glass screens, begun in 2015, and his works in lead - a core element in the stained glass process - continually produced from 2007.
The relationship between these bodies of Clarke’s work and light is intrinsic. The contrasting relationships are clearly visible - the leaded works absorb the light and the stained glass lets light through. Glass is a super-cooled liquid. There is a fluid quality to this barely static matter, as the layers respond to the changing light. The sense of movement comes from the journey the light makes, creating an ever-changing environment for the spectator.
The artist has always been involved with modern architecture, and has collaborated with Norman Foster on a number of occasions. Because of this, it was decided that the best way to show the stained glass screens - and to celebrate the fortieth birthday of the Sainsbury Centre building - was to show them in the main space, among and around the Sainsbury Collection.
Night Orchids
Embodying the idea of metamorphosis , the process whereby the human and the natural fuse together. The orchid also has a twilight feeling of hanging between life and death, between beauty and decay, and as such it reflects a central theme in much of Clarke's recent work; mortality.
The orchid itself has been dissected and disassembled, but it is still has the unsettling, heady ability to simulate human sexuality.
There is another kind of fragility to many of these images, or should I say to many of these flower. They appear to have been wounded, bruised. Indeed, they would seem to be bruises blossoming before one's eyes - Fleurs du mal of an intensely physical kind.
Robert Storr.
Francis Bacon
The Logic of Sensation Gilles Deleuze
Memento Mori
The inevitability of things.
The banality to evil, and of beauty in destiny.
Not to constantly remind oneself of mortality is to reduce the intensity and urgency of the living moment. It is essential part of the human condition.
Objective and subjective visions of life - and death - come together in this fusion of history and memory. Ultimately, it is up to us to make connections and develop themes.
Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 1572-1631.
A Valediction of Weeping.
Christopher Walmarth, Sculpture, using metal and glass through the minimalist idiom with poetical content.
Liminality Numinous Spiritual Transendental
A poem about the absolutely human trait of finding a way to move through tragedy towards hope and the ongoing nature of love; a determination not to forget the euphoria of life in the midst of suffering and desperation.
Explorations on temporality, loss and mourning.
Objects and words come to stand for many things and the personal becomes the universal.
The simultaneity of meaning , that easy shift that carries us from the personal, everyday life to spiritual values of universal themes.
I don't want to do anything that isn't at least an attempt to explore what it is to be a human being.
Brian Clarke, 2018.
UEA Brian Clarke in conversation with Paul Greenhalgh, 2018.
Dangerous Visions, slashed canvas Clarke acknowledges the work of Fontana. Visual and visionary poet interested in images of deadly beauty, conception and death.
The Faures, colour and grids/grissaille as a membranous veil, a spiritual body. Erotics of the screened body, dominatrix, ways of sensing the body.
Lilies for Linda stained glass envisioned as a portal/an in-between, an existentialism from the living to the dead.
Trans-Illumination, glass as a kinetic material activated by the movement of light and that of the viewer.
Alchemy and the urban fabric of the medieval mind. (the leaded skulls beyond the tradition of the medium)
Memory as a tool in the processes of the imagination. One can look at Clarke's work and be moved by it without knowing the stories buried in it, but the narratives are a vital cerebral tool for the artist; they drive him along and affect his formal decision -making, contributing to the atmosphere of finished pieces. His use of memory, in fact, directly connects him back to the intellectual formation of modem art.
The use of memory as a conceptual tool.
'Every instant has a thousand memories'. Henri Bergson.
Bergson is implying that we constantly carry our past experience around with us, that it impacts every aspect of our normative experience, everything we look at, touch, hear or taste. Our memories interpenetrate the fabric of our consciousness in support of this notion, Marc Auge has recently suggested that 'the past is never wholly occluded either on the individual or the collective level'.
Memory is a means by which the artist's subjective consciousness can be harnessed and used to impact, inflect and transform the objective formal processes of artistic creation. It is a principal tool with which the artist can explore the nature of the human.
Bergson pointed out that one could take a million photographs of a room, from every conceivable angle and level of detail, but these photographs could never capture the experience one has of entering the room. In other words, there are aspects of human experience we cannot capture photographically; we must find other means of describing the world.
Contemporary Opera/Ballet/Dance : Choreography Wayne McGregor
I first consciously noticed in 1977 that a 'duality' or 'contradiction' existed in my work. During that year I made the pictures entitled Dangerous Visions. These ten paintings were in large part born out of the Punk Rock movement and carried a nihilistic attack upon the orthodoxies of the day. They are in part an attempt to undermine conventional ideas about art and beauty, whilst also attempting to convey primary emotion. In the same period I designed a number of stained glass windows and free standing pieces, some of which are abstracted Arcadian landscapes in celebration of an as yet undefined optimism.
Brian Clarke, 2018.
The Orthogonal Grid Interrupted by Organic Material
Much of his oeuvre, and his deliberate disturbance of rhythms, of interruption as a tool in art, and about the reconciliation of contrary forces. We encounter this visual dialectic, of interjection and then reconciliation, frequently across the range of his imagery. The artist often creates a grid-like, geometric pattern across the picture frame, and then he interjects lines and marks, often as a more flowing, organic nature, to break this regularity.
The Interrupted Grid/Motifs
Interjection of Lines and Marks/Anomalies
The Fusion of Organic and Artificial Phenomena
Incidents in his life are fundamental to the mood of the work.
The screen confronts us with the timeless ubiquity of death and presents the silent anonymity that follows the chattering individuality of life.
Chill Out, a giant collection of skulls referenced from a catacomb, Subiaco, near Rome. Grisaille
Pointillism Divisionism
Dot Matrix, (The Swimmer, Clarke) see also Johan Thom Prikker/Sigmar Polke (Girlfriends) The concept of juxtaposing dots and marks of pure colour.
Despite his deep interest in first generation abstraction and, most notably, Constructivism and De Stijl, Clarke has never accepted pure abstraction as a given. He has always been a symbolist.
Calligraphic drawings on sheet lead.
An idiom of sheet lead, with stained glass, relief drawing, attachments and sgraffito-style mark making. The artist has through the leaded works revealed how the physical becomes the metaphysical, by turning lead - a pragmatic material in the stained glass process, a necessary physical component of the discipline - into poetic expression, into imagery saturated with universal and personal iconography.
All art is phenomenological, every aspect of the celebration that is art comes out of this encounter between two physical actualities, the material of art and the body of the spectator. Everything else - the poetry, ideas, emotions - emerges from this basic fact. The touchable physical stuff, the glass and lead that impacts our senses, our bodies.
Derrida, fragments GLAS
Derrida’s text turns philosophers, thieves, fathers and families into unstable figures; their identities are no longer assured, and neither are the usual hierarchies.
Architectural Transformations, Old Buildings/New Designs.
Space is already structured (Deleuze), it is place that is the relational human praxis of space.
The Dehumanised Nature of Human Consciousness, Silke Panse. Screening Nature : Cinema beyond the human. 2013
Metaphor (as a spatial experience/sensation?) is itself a philosophical concept. Multiplicity and Memory : Talking about Architecture with Peter Zumthor. Six Memos for The New Millennium, Italo Calvino.
Interiors as book, poem, essay, philosophical treatise.
To define these spaces one needs decisive characteristics woven into the fabric of the building in its everyday function. These characteristics or spatial zones will define exact physical limits to be read or navigated as an experiential experience. These zones mark the outside limits or boundaries of layered experiences.
GLAS; Derrida, (a philosopher interested with the “between”) Gias in French means the death knell tolling of a bell.
The methodology of reading.
Playful interrogations of the borders between philosophy and literary writing. “This anti-book stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature.”
Destabilising tactics through different typographical styles, formats and languages.
On The Lefthand Side.
Philosophy as expressed by Hegel, who believed that the bourgeoisie family was an embodiment of absolute knowledge and its subsequent passing down through strictly controlled channels.
On The Righthand side.
Subversive literature in the shape of the writings of Jean Genet, whose writings celebrate the very opposite of family values.
The experience of the text is its reading (like that of a collage) is that neither column can be read without its internal boundaries or edges being constantly opened up to the other column.
In each column, Derrida cites and grafts (what might these terms generate in architectural space) from Hegel’s personal letters and documents or from his philosophical texts, and from Genet’s journal of the thief and his prose poetry.
GLAS; Has in fact a multiplicity (multiplicity and memory in architecture, Peter Zumthor) of author’s and their authority is always placed in doubt; in fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries that seek to divide it up inside itself.
Peter Zumthor, interested in the authentic core of things, in emotions and imagining things and not theories. From the emotional/existential experience of things, Zumthor further embodies sensations of remembrance and memory into the fabric of his architecture.
Its fragments offer multiple beginnings and endings. Hegel’s Columns. (Heidegger)
Hegel’s “Absolute Knowledge” spirals through dialogues of thesis and antithesis into a higher synthesis that is in tum interrogated by conflict and resolution (dwelling) until it comes to rest as an “ultimate harmony” presided over by “absolute reason”.
Genet’s Columns. (Winterson)
Metaphors and puns seductively unfolding their colourful eddies, ruffles and dark labyrinths.
Derrida by placing both on the same page and in close proximity forces the reader to experience the literary effects, the unintentional connotations and insinuations and metaphors that blossom up in explosions of meaning; from within the most rigorously unruffled philosophical prose.
Architecture on reality and living (dwelling)
Architecture can go too far in completing and controlling social space and influencing the politics of the everyday. Spatial practices are needed as a plastic and permeable social architecture that loosens and adapts the everyday from the imposition of both state and history. From these first speculative oppositions, architectural practice can be informed with the differences between the logic of design and the reality of place.
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