Leigh Clarke

Leigh Clarke

Leigh's practice is a witty take on subjects including the media, monarchy and celebrity culture. His technique sits somewhere between sculpture, screen printing, intervention, and performance - previously a stand up comedian, this performative quality has stayed with his work in the visual arts.

I was fortunate enough to meet Leigh during the Elam International Printmaking Workshop. In regards to his comedy career, something that Leigh said in his seminar, and that has stuck with me since, was that every joke casts a shadow. For almost everything we find 'funny', there's a sort of underbelly, something that is degraded by the humour. Nonetheless, humour - whether dark or not - is a key component of his art practice.

For a while, Leigh was obsessed with collecting the newspaper headlines from local newspaper 'Hackney Gazette' - literally stealing them straight out of the metal stands outside vendors. From these he created a font, using only the letters from negative catchwords of horrific news items. He produced his own 'happy' headlines, before returning to replace the real headlines with the ones of his own making.

Before: "Doomsday fear over deadly virus…" (From Nowhere Left to Bury the Dead)

After: "Baby laughs at funny noise…" (From No Letters)

He also had a period of making works from rubber masks of famous people (politicians, celebrities, royalty) - photocopying them to make grotesque screen prints, and casting them inside-out to make sculptures, which accumulated into the installation entitled 'Heads of State.'

"Heads of State" at the Whitechapel Gallery

Finally, to kick start my art collection I came away from the workshop with a copy of the above print: 'A disfunctional family' (and no, that's not a typo, he spelled 'dysfunctional' wrong initially and just embraced it)

Leigh Clarke creates singular, provocative statements using mass manufactured, multiple objects. His main source of recent research is in latex, political masks that he acquires through the Internet, ranging from Ayatollah Khomeini, Fidel Castro, Nicolas Sarcozy and Hilary Clinton. Through a process of reprographic manipulation, the images generated through squashing, folding and scanning the masks reveal shadowy, abstracted portraits that oppose the original function of the object.
The artist then offers a more confrontational experience to the viewer by casting his discoveries 3-dimensionally at human scale. By stripping the mask of it’s intended irony and satire, Clarke reveals hidden truths about how we read images of political figureheads through the media. His understanding of comedy through his own performance work enables him to expose the serious, often dark, creative foundations needed to make humor.

Kusseneers Gallery

Artist website: Leighclarkeworks.com

Street art

[Note: these images are from my gap year in 2013, which I spent trawling the art galleries of Europe and taking lots of photos of artworks that I liked. Over the past summer I have organised+compiled all of these. By doing so and uploading them here I’m hoping to find connections and identify common elements, creating a record of the things I felt drawn to and inspired by.]
Amsterdam:

Basel:

Paris:

Barcelona:

Aaand the winner is… Valencia:

Street Art Valencia facebook page
Interview with Valencia street artist ESCIF

Of course graffiti is a viable tactic for engaging the public sphere. I see graffiti as a necessary symptom of life in contemporary cities. A painted wall represents a way of using the city that is not thought about socially (though it becomes more so every day). It seems very interesting to me that people that live in a city do not settle for using it according to imposed rules; they invent new ways of utilizing it. It seems of equal validity to me to paint a wall, to put on a party in a plaza or to organize a brunch on a rotunda. There exists a collective social ethic that makes us understand a tag on a dumpster as a sign of vandalism while a McDonalds stuck in the historical center of the city is seen as a sign of progress.