'Paradise Apparatus'

‘Paradise Apparatus’ is symphonic in structure: multiple recurring themes and motifs combine in a fugue-like web of rhythmic patterns and shuttling colours. The nub of the show is tripartite. An installation constructed around ballet shoes, a part reconstruction of Clark’s girlhood bedroom, and the film Red Shoes are the central elements, infusing the entire show with meaning. Every little girl longs to become a ballerina, and Red Shoes, the story of a ballet dancer, is very much the stuff of girlish fantasy. Shot in the late 1940s, the movie is set in an upper-class England of plummy, rounded vowels that has irrevocably disappeared. The actors’ RADA-trained diction and the romantic musical score now possess a period charm that steeps the show in nostalgia and yearning.      

Red Shoes presents a parable about the artistic vocation, the sacrifices the dancer makes to perfect her art, and the conflict between her desire for love and romance, and her obsessive commitment to dance. The heroine is possessed by her vocation and destroyed by it. As the first film that two generations of the Clark family saw as children, it became part of the family mythology, and so Clark’s work of the same name refers to the artist’s youth. The two periods, the '40s when the film was made, and the '80s when Clark grew up, are shuffled together. In Clark’s ‘Paradise Apparatus’, her artistic calling is seen crystallizing in Julia, the dreamy child infatuated with dance, and then revisited in the mature, adult artist fixated on her creativity, and subject to the same conflicts as the heroine of Red Shoes.

A pair of crimson ballet shoes identical to those in Red Shoes, and similar to Dorothy’s footwear in The Wizard of Oz, are poised on point on a plinth where they form the focal point of an installation. The ballet shoes, like Cinderella’s glass slipper, were vehicles of transformation, turning the upper-crust debutante of Red Shoes into a resplendent prima donna assoluta. Four red ribbons swoop the eye to the ceiling where they transmute into the colours of the spectrum before disappearing into a row of bottles containing dyes drawn from the entire chromatic scale. This is a glancing allusion to The Wizard of Oz which is closely associated with the song 'Somewhere over the Rainbow'. The colours of the spectrum are a leitmotif. Clark insinuates prismatic rainbow hues into every work as emblems of possibility, carrying romantic overtones of the wish granted and the dream come true. 

The final key element is a peek into Julia’s vanished childhood bedroom crammed with schoolgirl bric-a-brac. This creates an atmosphere of intimacy, persuading the viewer that he ‘knows’ this insatiably curious lass. The memorabilia testify to Clark’s early efforts to familiarize herself with the world and its workings, and evoke her fascination with science, optics, color, alchemy, theatre, art, cinema and ballet. There are many squizzes into the past. A pile of soft, cuddly toys projects us into the tender pink and blue world of Julia’s nursery. Random stashes of fluted cones, reminiscent of sea-shells, reference childish rituals of investigation and collecting.  Molded papier-máché objects redolent of cakes, blancmanges and jellies suggest housey-housey and the child’s capacity for flights of fantasy and make-believe.   Other objects resemble sand-castles, miniature cities or lakes filled with craft.  These mud-pie-like creations embody the primitive, creative urge that impels children to unwittingly behave like artists and carve out their private universe by giving concrete expression to their imagination.    
 
Clark’s ontological inquiry also bears on Nature, which she views as an awesome, mysterious force so vast and all-encompassing that man can never wholly comprehend it. The opacity of the universe frustrates our efforts to fathom, contain or represent it, and the failure of such attempts forms another unifying thread. Clark pitches many of her works on that blurry borderline where fabric and stage design collide with art. The viewer cannot be sure whether what he looks at is art, craft or design, and ponders whether it is autonomous and self-sufficient, or whether its meaning resides in its relationship to other artworks.   

Ballets Russes, a suite of pierced screens, ventures into a glutted Russian sumptuousness of color that recalls Leon Bakst’s flamboyant scenography and the exotic ambience of the Diaghilev-like Lermontov, the manipulative, émigré, impresario of the ballet company in The Red Shoes. Clark’s sense of colour and fantasy rivals the prodigality of Nature’s flora, but her stylized linear intricacy and repeat patterning set it apart from botany’s unruly forms, and play on the recurring theme of the contrast between art and Nature. Paracelsus, a mirror-topped table supporting molded crystal glasses, jugs and vases, and its twin Newton, a suspended circle of glass laden with tinted beakers and flutes, hark back to the artist’s girlhood and her medically-inclined mother’s influence. The glass recalls the crucibles, alembics and retorts lining a medical laboratory or alchemist's study. It invokes the miracle of medicine, the alchemical process of transmuting base metal into gold and smacks of the magic potions of myth and fairy tale. Reflected on the wall, the two pieces form seductive abstract patterns reminiscent of some living organism seen through a microscope.  As one moves around the table top, so the top picks up reflections from adjacent displays, transforming its appearance and giving it the volatility so typical of Clark’s art.
    
Because such work is analytical and concerned with the essence of reality, Clark funnels her inspiration into pseudo-scientific formats such as diagrams and annotated models and charts. The influence of the didactic machinery of museum display is seen in the strings connecting various elements in a single work, and establishing links between them. Art-work is a perfect example. From small apertures punched though a cheap reproduction of a flower piece, issue strings looped to the ceiling, walls and floor. These terminate in fragments of crystal, related to the hue in the area of the painting from which the string emerges, or in glass bottles filled with dyes. The link between art and reality is restored, and attention drawn to the mysteries of colour and the alchemical and scientific experiments which produced it in the past.  

A passion for geometry manifests itself in Clark’s construction, which is based on primary geometric configurations that suggest the structure of matter, and convey her longing for order, clarity, structure and meaning. However, this geometry appears in the detail, and not the overall appearance of her pieces which are often messily shapeless. Dottie is a typical specimen. This shaggy, disheveled sculpture is suspended from the ceiling and islanded in space. Formed from a collapsing trelliswork of loops embellished with strings of circles, and zigzagging cut-outs, it typifies the artist’s taste for the loose, baggy and shambling. Arrows of white tape accompanied by captions form another element in the pedagogic apparatus. They converge on all the exhibits, providing nuggets of information. This practice becomes problematic in works, like the quasi-arboreal Dottie, which seems to act as a channel for Nature’s eruptive vitality and processes of generation and growth.  

Unfortunately, it is impossible to be more specific as to what Dottie ‘says’, as the lady’s speech is incomprehensible. Obviously the captions are intended to extend the significance of Dottie, and Clark’s other Nature-centered exhibits, introducing the subsidiary theme of science’s attempt to analyze natural phenomena through allusion to figures like Newton and Paracelsus. However, Clark’s academic name-dropping and references to often obscure alchemists and scientists form a pseudo-intellectual smokescreen that obscures her meaning. It is as if Clark realized that such works fail to relay any comprehensible ‘message’, and in an attempt to invest them with import, she has erected this apparatus of high falutin reference which give her exhibits the infuriating fascination of the insoluble puzzle or crossword. 
 
Although bafflingly uncommunicative, the vitality and sprawling appearance of these pieces gives them an undeniably challenging presence. Like some voracious parasitical creeper, endowed with an invasive space-ingesting vigour, they plant a jungle within the gallery’s pristine white cube, infesting the walls, clinging to the ceilings, swallowing up the floor. Their ferocity and Hunnish appetite for lebensraum give them an unnerving potency, and assert Clark’s refusal to contain, frame or box her art, and her insurmountable urge to blur boundaries, and fill the gallery with a geyser-like gush of stuff that captures Nature’s wildness and aggression. 

Clark is a promising artist. Her unfettered romantic fantasy, strait-jacketed in scientific austerity, strikes a distinctive note and one hopes that greater self-discipline and control will overcome the hazy focus and impenetrability that mar the impact of this otherwise beguiling and refreshing show.