The Other Sun | 5 – 29 March 2025 | Olsen Gallery Sydney
Residing as cinematic vignettes, these paintings impart a consideration of an unfamiliar landscape clearly not of this hemisphere. This landscape is unfamiliar to the viewer, but interestingly, unfamiliar to the artist too. A vision that lies somewhere far beyond our horizon, imbued with a landscape of another’s memory, and of a deep stretching history.
The Other Sun is dually a tribute to a sun that is not yet known, or a sun one may never know. One of great significance and contemplation. A celestial and unforgettable object on the other side of the world. When it passes into ours it is inherently different, despite being the very same object. Perhaps this nether or underworld it illuminates is of a different past or future to our own. Perhaps it is someone else’s past.
With the act of setting (or rising) akin to Rene Magritte’s Evening Falls (1964), a searing red sun permeates across several works. Omnipresent and ever impacting, it is a stark antithesis to the never-ending landscape of ice it illuminates. Magritte’s sun is small, composed as a blip in a wider picture. Clarke’s are unavoidable, leering, and anew, most prominent in In the vastness between us, I hollowed a place for a sea. This type of sun is a humble yet stark reminder of our smallness, our mortality, and of earth’s worldly beauty. We often orientate ourselves in a landscape through celestial objects, and this one is clearly not familiar; however, it is not quite science fiction, rather possessing an everyday kind of magic.
The very defining image of The Other Sun is arguably One Last Look. We witness a front facing view of a house, surrounded by an icy rural environment. The title imparts that this could be a final glance at a much-loved home being left behind for the last time. The emotive response could be seen as either sanguine or forlorn, and for the viewer to decide which weight. The sheer unfamiliarity of the next environment, of what lies ahead, of an immense yet often essential journey that is about to be undertaken, is characteristic of the 20th century migrant experience, and that of Clarke’s grandparents. That incredible act of leaving your life behind forever and knowing that you never will return. One Last Look is a significant vision that will stay with you, as a finite image burned thick into your retina, into your dreams, your desires: to remain an image of one’s past but never of the future.
Depicted throughout works such as Like Fish Beneath a Lid of Ice and The Fisherman are figures that stand more like silhouettes than portraits; they are anonymous and faceless, both nobody and anybody at the same time, as either a collective or solitary figure. A person becomes an active shadow in this light; A smoky sceptre. Almost memorial. The practice of ice fishing, common in Latvia where Clarke’s family originates, is intensely slow, dominated by waiting. We see patience at work here. Sitting. Waiting. Looking. Ruminating. Thinking.
Tourist and Time Traveller seem to be contextually located in the present, and reflective of the artist’s personal experience of looking, of searching, of the act of looking back, and pausing to reflect on the process. The car rear vision, casting the artist's eyes, also oblique, yet impassioned, are indicative of that very real desire to look backwards, to conduct a search and to investigate.
Despite the notions of both overarchingly slow and forced fast change that are depicted, a lingering sentimentality prevails, empathised most crucially through the significance of the Baltic fishermen. These images convey a prevailing sense of personal fable, one that we create for ourselves and over time as a family collective. How do we find a sense of who we are? This evisceration speaks to both our worldly history, and to our otherworldly history, and of the quest to correlate shared knowledge.
The impassioned task of looking back into the past without the exact knowledge of exactly how to do so.
Jose Henrique Bortoluci writes in the book What is Mine; “How do you narrate the life of an ordinary man? I’m hindered by the silence of the sources, the erasure of any records of people who build the world, who write their stories with hands and feet, with words that are spoken and sung, with sweat and blemished skin. I try to enter the territory of the constant coming and going of those who hardly took photos, or wrote journals, or gave interviews, or were filmed. I searched, as Bertolt Brecht suggests we do, for the ones who build the palaces and the walls, not the nobles and generals who command them; the cooks, drivers, gardeners and cleaners, not the dignitaries in the halls of power.”
As with Bortoluci, Clarke is interested in an ideological search for meaning and identity through the past, and through knowledge that is both known and unknown, and perhaps, even biologically innate. Painting can act as a way of thinking, a revelatory act in learning and discovery; a meditation on one’s past and future, a static representation of thoughts in flux. The power of this show lies in the examination of physical time and space correlating across both emotional worlds and voids. The deepness and strangeness of everyday life.
Actual history can never be ultimately known - only wondered, gleaned, interpreted. These paintings are perhaps a record of a search; reflections on a journey, appreciated through space and time and now on the walls for us to further wonder.
Angela Garrick February 2025
