James Clarkson

James Clarkson’s sculpture is focused on understanding the looping associations between consumer objects and diverse histories of; image, sculpture, mass manufacture, design, drawing and painting. The objects he chooses are often mundane – a car, a waste paper bin, a wine rack… his work manipulates these objects into ghostly bodies of past histories, which materialise as reflections of where we are now.

This investigation is underpinned by a fetishised interest in the authenticity of material, sometimes existing as a bricolage of hacked up, raw edged, repurposed objects and at other times a shiny, slick, glossy replica. Much like the consumer objects they simulate these sculptures are critically self aware of their own in-authenticity, but subvert this truth in the blurriness of a wider cultural system. And it is in this duality between reframing and replicating objects that Clarkson’s sculptures find a playful approach to unpicking the speculative interconnectivity of things.