Clive Humphreys

Everything in its Right Place

Most arguments conducted in any language tend to revert, ultimately, to an argument about that language.

During the last five years my research has consistently developed around the potentials and problems of pictorial composition and its various strategies for engagement of the viewer. As a teacher of textiles, I have had a long interest in the language of pattern (based very strongly on the unit of the mirror image) and have set out to test those aspects of textile language more usually associated with the “decorative” arts in a quite different context. Of course, the formal devices of composition cannot exist in some disembodied state, and I have used this “decorative” grammar to excavate some darker, metaphysical spaces, particularly the shallow, claustrophobic space of the glass cabinet within the museum.

Initially this exploration looked most strongly at the lateral notions of repeat across the picture plane that, more recently, I have been examining in terms of a front to back spatial depth that doesn't rely on constructed perspective.

History is the trajectory that carries us into a projected future and is therefore always implicated in some essential way in all my painting, both in its method and its reading. I have never seen my own research practice as a series of discrete projects but rather as a set of fundamental concerns that overlap, backtrack and become visible outcomes in relation to each other over a period of time.

Recently I have completed paintings that move away quite substantially from mirror patterning and deal more with pictorial space in terms of modulated densities. It is the visual equivalent of taking the gathered elements from previous paintings and casting them into deep space.

This recent departure may well establish itself as a pivotal moment.