Maiden Voyages by clive knights

This series of six small collages has been made especially for publication here at Sharp Hands Gallery and emerged from the serendipitous gathering of paper fragments in the many piles strewn across the work surfaces of my studio in Portland, Oregon.

When making a collage, I extemporize from the beginning until the gathered paper fragments begin to incite a theme or narrative which might then loosely direct the selection of further fragments to complete a work, and possibly inspire a series, as it did here. I prefer to build a concrete array or field with papers of different surface qualities, textures, tonalities, shapes and colors, free of easily recognizable imagery. If an image is instantly recognizable it can distract from the whole and weaken the metaphoric capacity of the work as it will tend to dominate. So, images have to be carefully dissected and reoriented to offer partial recognition, preferably misrecognition, as this will open up avenues towards rejuvenated interpretations. In utilizing discarded commercial print material, it is inevitable that human narratives and implied storylines will present themselves in found image fragments and in doing so form a portal to whole regions of human affairs that then flood through that conduit into the imagination of the artist, and then, later on, into the imagination of the viewer via the work itself. In this series of collages, titled Maiden Voyages, a number of enigmatic female faces came to the surface and led me to ponder the plight of women, their dreams, their fears, their sense of freedom but also its denial by the often surreptitious forces of their gendered counterparts. The title of each piece comes directly from a reading of the completed work and, I hope, throws semantic ambience as well as ambiguity into the interpretation of each one.

Clive Knights is an English collage artist, printmaker, and designer of festival structures. His professional background is in architectural education, and he was the founding director of the first school of architecture in Portland, Oregon, at Portland State University. He has been making collages since before he can remember and is represented by the gallerist Laura Vincent in Portland. Since 2021 he has had three solo shows of his collages and monotype prints in Portland, and a solo show at Sacripante Gallery in Rome, Italy, in May 2023. He has exhibited in over 30 group shows in multiple US states and overseas nations, including England, Scotland, Poland, Belgium, Slovenia, Estonia, Ukraine, Russia, Norway, Italy, and Australia. In April 2022, he curated the international exhibition titled Corporeal Gestures in Portland that included over 100 collages by more than 100 artists from 22 countries. He designed and published the catalogue of all the work in this show. In June 2022 he published his first monograph covering his own work from the last three years titled Gestures from a Body at Work: Unsuccessful Attempts at Grasping Eternity.

Instagram: @knightsclive

Website: www.cliveknights.com

For pricing information on Clive’s work, please contact us.

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