Adam Clarke

There is an immediate link forged between artist and audience, but formed not of the transparency that a practice informed by the minimal might presume. Rather conditioned by the very degrees of visibility that the artist chooses to obscure. To partially conceal, or sometimes completely obliterate, some grainy image from which we understand a certain dialogue to some forgotten history or social narrative made all the more provocative to the voyeuristic gaze, by the imposed obstruction of the artistic act. Our investment in the image-come-object understood as not necessarily of fetish, but rather a challenge to certain conventions of production and ways of seeing.

 In this paradoxical discourse between the forgotten and the visible, we find ourselves adrift in an almost hyperreal imagining of a flat, cyclical historical narrative. Half true, semi-imaginary, but somehow as concrete as the work ethic that my practice confronts in the contradiction of labour versus leisure. Of artist versus labourer.

By laying out a series of historical facts, events and interweaving elements of fiction or modern interpretations, the framework becomes set for the question: what is work and what is art? I am examining the role of the artist and the craftsman.