NUALA CLARKE
Artist Statements

Out from the experience of being a human a soft sweetness emerges. Through the layers of perception and sensation and connection to land and personal history, the sight of the cycle of life connects a series of dots that give structure to the random dots of the mundane. These instinctive, spontaneous paintings stand somewhere between abstraction and a view of the world. Each piece relates to moments in time, the space of the world and observance of phenomenal and sensory input. 

“One Thousand Worlds”

“I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me and serve my spirit.” (John Keats. Oct 1818)  

A series of modified mono-prints “One Thousand Worlds” consists of 1000 7x7” works on paper created between March 2008 and Dec 2009.  This work is spontaneous, informative and generative. They are repetitious microcosms, which pay particular attention to physical matter and mapping of space, using passage of time, sequence of events and memory. I concentrate on minutiae and rely upon a state of being and the environment in which I’m working for reference. 

This work is linked to the systems theory of “emergence” where complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions and where simple entities operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. The work moves between being an intricate discreet object to being referential to universal states, shifting scale from one to one thousand. I used a list of the processes that go into “world-making” (“Ways of Worldmaking”, Nelson Goodman) namely composition and decomposition, weighting, ordering, deletion and supplementation and deformation as a guide. 

This work is made by taking a print, through a circular template, from a surface with acrylic paint. The modifications are then made to each one with pen, pencil, ink or paint. The paper is hand-cut 140 lb multimedia paper, 7x7” in size. I worked on between 5 and 15 at the same time and order and number that block according to color, texture and occasional development of theme. The imagery in the modification is suggested by the initial print and arises in the moment of working.