Gary Clarke

Clarke is an Irish Swedish artist, a graduate of NCAD in Dublin. His artistic practice is currently divided between representational and a more conceptual approach, concerned with communicating personal stories. With a background in theatre, Clarke’s interest in ‘story’ is evident in the more representational work: a group of characters, a scenario or setting, sometimes with text written on the surface, partly visible. Is the paint covering over the text or is the text breaking out, a story surfacing? The starting point for many of these images are old, discarded photos and slides, rescued from bins and dumpsters, which are given a new more dramatic lease of life. But some stories and ideas are not easily told in a representational way, and another artistic approach is needed: portraits on jigsaw puzzles, cut up and reassembled on QR code patterns based on written text. Here the text is secret and hidden in the scratched lines of the QR pattern, but as the original text and original jigsaw images are now no longer readable, ‘story’ must be constructed by the viewer.