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)
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 GalleryArtist website: Leighclarkeworks.com
