Richard Clarke
I have used nails in my work because they are a basic commodity, composed from one of the universe’s basic elements. These canvases are contemplations on the process by which the elements that bind us are continually being transformed. Iron in rock, as in blood (haemoglobin), leaves its stain, as the elements assemble and reassemble themselves in the universal interlocking of life, death and transformation.
Artist’s Statement
My work explores the notions of time, process, and the interconnectedness of all matter. Elemental iron exists far outside earth’s orbit and yet is present in the air we breathe, in the oxygen-carrying molecules of our blood, and in the earth to which we return. It’s in the stars and in the earth, in vegetation and blood and dust. Thus we are linked with the primordial universe and also with all animal and vegetable life on our planet, now and in the future. We are part of the planets, the earth, and each other, and I have tried to touch upon this in a very basic way.
The process of staining the canvas takes place over a period of weeks and months. The stain is both the image of the nail, and the substance of the transformation process. The pattern / field of stains marks a continuum and can help focus the mind in a similar way to contemplative triggers such as the cross, the mandala, or the starry sky. Its end moment is imperceptible, as the edges of the canvas fragment.
But at the same time the marks are tangible and familiar. Nails are a fundamental human artefact, and many communities in this region (Sheffield) were sustained by nail making. We all recognise the marks of rust. Canvas too is a very basic commodity and can be close to human bodies from the cradle to the shroud. The cloth and the iron, each in transition, display a process which is nothing less than the universal unfolding of atoms and galaxies. The iron will eventually partake of another form – perhaps an animal or a plant – but it will always be part of this process, as will the canvas, as will the observer.
The stains give us an image, an intuition, of the process of transition, something which has already happened and is continuing to happen. Like the light of an exploding star which reaches us long after the event, the stain remains long after the nail has done its work and, like the iron in the exploding star, it is ready to reform in a different part of the universe.
Iron Age priests and 20th century physicists had different frameworks for describing the process of transition and the reality of interconnectedness. I personally find these realities to be beyond words, and so my work is an attempt to explore them differently; visually, perhaps?
