A cover and a feature article in
CRAFT magazine in March 2013, an exhibition at SO gallery in Brick Lane, a participation
to Design Days DUBAI with the Crafts Council, a solo exhibition to come…. David
Clarke is a busy silversmith! But he kindly managed to spare a couple of hours
to answer my questions.
David has usually been dubbed “the enfant terrible” of silversmithing,
or a “provocateur” and even a “terrorist”… When asked if he enjoys
being called such names, he denies strongly. “I cannot control what people say about me. I am tired of being described
as an angry person who cuts up stuff. I don’t want to destroy the discipline rather
to tackle it with a different attitude”.
Having followed David’s work for
some years now, I think that there is actually much more than mere provocation in
it. I was very keen to understand what really drives him…
David
First, a flashback is useful to
understand David’s current work. After graduating from the Royal College of Art
in 1997, the young silversmith was incredibly successful. His degree show’s
collection consisted in a series of stripped down fruit bowls that attracted the
entire establishment. One piece went straight to the V&A and the Goldsmith’s
Company commissioned another one. According to David, his success was mainly
due to the fact that he was using a visual language that was radically
different from what was going on at that time and that his works fitted
perfectly the range of interior design products people loved in the 90’s: “it was satisfying all my financial
requirement and desires” he remembers
“but it didn’t satisfy my creativity. All I was doing was producing the same
kind of work again and again. I became a machine”.
Pear Epergne, 1997
The revelation came during a
workshop at Bishopsland: he was part of a group of silversmiths left in a field
with sheets of silver but no tools except a hand guillotine and a torch. His
first impulse was to try and recreate a studio but instead he let the magic
operate and came back with a better understanding of what was important for
him. This experience was very profound and he realised how his tools and his
workspace were crucial, both physically and emotionally. Having been close
to nature during this workshop, he decided to engage with the rawness of silver
and started to use his scraps of the precious metal. He made a collection where
the hammer marks, the firestain and the seams were visible. He drew on the
metal, using felt tips and pens. “It was
almost like showing work in progress”, he recalls and “ it was a real challenge for myself, for the
galleries and for the audience”.
One Dayers, 2005
Keeping his momentum, he went a
step further with the “Salt work” where the silver pieces were dipped in a
salted solution that attacked the metal.
Insalted V, 2009
The idea was not to destroy the
metal per se but to test the limits of silver and to challenge the tradition of
silversmithing and its dos and don’ts. In his article about David in this
month’s issue of CRAFT magazine, Glenn Adamson implies that it is less
challenging being an avant-gardist in the narrow world of contemporary Metalsmithing
than in the wild universe of contemporary Art, where so many boundaries have
already been tested. However I am still convinced that pushing the limits of a
discipline like David Clarke does requires a lot of audacity. When I asked him
if his past successes gave him the legitimacy to challenge conventions like he
did with the salt pieces, he reckoned that being established in the discipline
helped him a lot, and that if he had done that as a student, the hill would
have been much higher to climb.
Drawing on the metal, using salt
on silver…what could have been the next “sacrilege”? I have deliberately chosen
the word sacrilege as David describes the relationship people have with silver
as almost sacred: we use white gloves to manipulate silver objects, we worship
them in display cases, we barely touch them to avoid staining them, we polish
them at nauseam. Lead was the answer: it is often described as the “cancer” of
silver. When heated and melted, it literally eats silver. David’s first works
with lead were a series of silver objects cut in different parts then “fixed”
with lead parts.
Yea ha, 2007
Brouhaha, 2007
Then came the work “Dead on arrival” where a silver tea
service eaten by lead rests in a leather carrying case…
Dead on arrival, 2012
Dead on arrival, 2012
Those works have triggered some extreme reactions in
the audience. Amongst them is this letter sent anonymously to David. I can’t
resist publishing an extract: ”Is this
intended to be some sort of joke? All you seem to be able to do is take the
work of other, much more highly skilled makers than yourself and then mutilate
it with obscure, unnecessary additions. What a waste of silver! As if that
wasn’t bad enough, upon closer inspection and with further research it’s become
apparent that you actually contaminate your silver using lead? Do you even
understand how wasteful this is? Silver is a precious, pure and beautiful
material as it is. It is ‘makers’ like yourself who pollute the good name of
many contemporary silversmiths coming up with interesting, functional designs
as well as beautiful sculptural pieces”.
What an
unintentional tribute to David’s work! This letter can be seen in its integrality
in the silversmith’s website and on David’s Facebook page it has reached 230
likes and 125 comments altogether. I even asked David if he didn’t write this letter
himself as it was almost too good to be true! But it was for real, and he even added
another story: a couple in their 60’s visiting the Swedish Gallery where he was
exhibiting in August 2012 smashed one of his pieces on the ground and destroyed
it claiming that it was “the ugliest work
they had ever seen”…Two unpleasant happenings together as they had to pay
for the broken piece…
David takes
responsibility for the consequences of his attacks against the precious metal
and even though he finds those two extreme behaviors very violent against his
creativity, he enjoys the fact that his work triggers passionate reactions. He
has since tried to contact both the writer and the couple, though without any
success yet.
But David also enjoys the other end of the reactions spectrum:
he has regular buyers, fans of his work and he loves asking them to send him
pictures of the objects in their surroundings. He brings out this lovely story
of a lady telling him that his “teapot
had changed my husband’s breakfast and is the beginning of our days”… This
story outlines some other very important aspects of David’s work: emotion and
humour. Pushing the boundaries of the silversmith world can also be obtained through
less radical gesture than destroying the metal. Titillating the seriousness,
the rigor and the relative classicism of the silver world is paramount to
David’s approach. “We try to make
everything very profound nowadays but there is a space for playing and laughing”,
he told me. “I like my work to have different
levels of reading and I want it to be accessible and communicative”.
Some of his works
are very cartoon-like and David likes when people laugh in front of them: “when you laugh, it changes your physical and
mental state. It is very healthy”. I can’t stop myself smiling when I look at the works
photographed below:
Deeperer, 2009
In flux exhibition, 2012
Chuffing marvelous and
friends, 2009
Miss de caf, 2009
The
emotion in those spoons and pots comes from the bizarre associations, the
oversized details, the comic deprivation of basic functions: they could almost
be some characters in Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland.
This
collection of amazing works leads me to the next theme that is essential to
David’s work: function and non-function and the grounding of the artist in its
discipline, the silversmithing. Often compared to fine artists like Cornelia
Parker (who smashes silver objects and suspends them in the air), I asked David
if he was not frustrated not to be featured at the Tate Modern as Cornelia
does.
Cornelia Parker, Alter
Ego 2012, photo from Frith Street Gallery Website
“I have no need or ambition to be there”,
he replies. “I once had an identity
crisis and I called myself an artist but now I insist on being named a
silversmith”. “I might be at an extreme edge of my discipline, but it is my
grounding in silversmithing that makes my work relevant”.
I
believe that challenging domestic objects, giving them a second chance or
another identity, playing with the notions of function and dysfunction are at
the core of the contemporary Applied Arts scene and David is currently one of
the most creative and interesting artists to engage with those challenging
topics.
His
collaborative projects with other artists are an important part of his artistic
approach as well: he is a member of 60/40, a trio made up of Tracey Rowledge,
Clare Twomey and himself with the aim of injecting new vitality and content
into craft. He is also part of “Intelligent Trouble”, a group of makers (Helen
Carnac, Lin Cheung, David Gates, Katy Hackney, Shane Waltener and David
Littler) whose manifesto is to ”explore
the possibilities of working together and what new things could be done.
Without jettisoning our own identities, opening our selves to the actions and
provocations of others. Trying to find out a little about how each of us works
and thinks, locating the overlaps in approaches’.
Another
aspect of David’s personality, which is only briefly mentioned in the published
literature about him, is his contribution to the training of the new generation
of silversmiths. He teaches in many different countries and considers that it
is part of his role to educate people. He usually gives creative lectures and
tutorials (and refuses technical ones) where he challenges and encourages
students to think outside the box and step out of their comfort zone. When I asked
him what kind of teacher he was, he laughed and replied: “I am not saying, “today we are going to smash silver”. I don’t want to
create miniatures of me. I see myself more like a coach who helps student to
question the work they produce, the context in which they operate and the
diversity of their thinking”.
Having
recently taught in Sweden and in China, I asked him if he saw some cultural
differences between students there and in the UK. “The students don’t really change, It is the structure of the department
where they are taught that sets the framework of what is acceptable or not”.
“The Chinese students work at an
extraordinary level and their ambition is massive but at the end of the day
they will all have produced the same ring following the instructions written on
the blackboard”. My next question came logically: if those students have to
follow precise instructions and conform to a single design, what can they take
out of David’s teaching? “They were very
happy and it is phenomenal to see the journey they went through. But you are
right, I am concerned about what they will do with it”. He is soon going
back to China and it is a matter he wants to discuss with the head of
department before continuing teaching there.
David’s
portrait would be incomplete without mentioning his two latest bodies of works both
featured at SO Gallery in London: Fix, Fix, Fix currently until 24/03, and a Solo
Exhibition in April.
Sweetheart
is the piece exhibited at Fix, Fix, Fix and is a collaborative work with the sugar
jewellery artist Natalie Smith.
Sweetheart, 2012
I
find this work very interesting for two reasons: first, it shows that the
artist never indulges in facility and manages to remain unpredictable. An
exhibition about artists fixing objects was the perfect space for David to show
one of his teapots, dismembered and recreated with other parts of silver or
lead. But he chose to display a work that plays metaphorically with the idea of
fixing. This “bonbonniere” had been left unwanted when he bid it on Ebay, (like
a broken heart) and he asked Natalie Smith to fix it, to sweeten it with sugar.
It took her 6 months to grow sugar around it and the result is beautiful and
poignant.
Secondly,
it shows a rupture in the inexorable journey of silver destruction that David
has followed recently: sugar protects the silver and makes it even more
desirable. I asked David if one could see it as a way of “re-loving” the
silver? “I don’t know where I am going
with this piece. It is a one off, very different. And it was for me an opportunity to work with Natalie, who is an expert
in sugar.”.
So,
is it time yet to see David back to working silver in a friendlier manner?
Having had the privilege of a private view of work-in-progress “Spare Parts”,
his forthcoming exhibition, one can only doubt….
Spare Parts, 2013
As
a matter of fact with “Spare Parts”, it is the first time that silver is
totally absent from David’s work… to be replaced by pewter: no dismembered or
discarded objects, just sheets of metal. Pewter is very soft and gives him
freedom and spontaneity. The work will bear the imprint of the hammering, the
soldering, the filing. The pieces will be interchangeable, playful and will
require a lot of commitment from the public. Interaction will be the main
concept of the exhibition. David wants to provoke the audience: “people are not really seeing exhibitions at
the moment. They are all about twitting, blogging, facebooking it instead of
enjoying the present moment. With this work, they will have to assemble parts, to
build objects … some bits have no home to go, others are interchangeable…I
won’t have any control of what might happen. It is very experimental.” The
exhibition opens on the 4th of April at SO Gallery (website). It is worth popping in there and
playing with the spare parts.
I
hope that after reading this article, people will no longer see David as an “enfant terrible, a provocateur or a
terrorist” but rather as a very unpredictable, prolific, talented and generous
artist who brings a lot to the discipline without choosing the easy way or losing
his integrity.
Silver
or not silver? As they say “there
is only a thin line between love and hate”….
David
Clarke’s website
