ALEXANDRIA CLARK - ARTIST STATEMENT
Art is a connection;
a pathway that connects the artist with their audience.
Through this idea, I aim to produce work that can reach the viewer on a personal level, by evoking memories, exposing my own, and taking them through an experience that connects us intimately. I am mainly interested in recording myself and others around me;
It is the notion of watching people and exploring the boundaries or ‘crossover’ between innocent observation and actually becoming an intrusive voyeur that truly intrigues and excites me.
The people of our world seem to have an obsession with being noticed. I share with writer Margaret Atwood[1], the idea that we are all worried that one day we will realise that our life has passed us by without us being recorded and thus not continuing to exist in some form after we have physically gone. My audience is not aimed at the young as it can be quite intimate and could be unsuitable, but apart from that, it is for anyone: each viewer has the potential to develop characters within my story and thus become entwined with my memories. I am continually writing down descriptions, feelings, notes on certain experiences in my many notebooks and incorporate parts of it into my freewriting when appropriate and where certain thoughts spark off connections to these recordings of past encounters. My work takes the form of language and text within a performative context. Through live performances of typing, I have explored the act of writing, where time is overlapped, where the dimensions of memories in the past and the record of people in the present are merged. I am very interested in how the words appear on the page and fall down
the page
and how each pause and the spacing controls how it is supposed to be read.
Through being personal and writing about private and intimate relationships and experiences, it creates a sense of awkwardness and the uncomfortable for the audience. I find this control that it gives me, a very important part of my work. Within my work there is a continual theme of the idea of playing games and ‘role-play’. During the performances, I take on the roles and perspectives of different people, both real and fictional. Throughout the piece, there is persistent questioning on whether it is make believe or truth or a mixture. When it comes down to it...
it all really... is just a game.