During a residency on the Croatian island of Vis in 2013, Joe Clark conceived and executed a new series  of photographs  depicting blades  of Seagrass in gestural  configurations against the gradient of the setting sun.  

“In the Seagrass series the photographic contents can be understood through the idea of vision –  and its  supposed analogue  in photography –  mediating between  bodily experience and interior life. The layer of curved organic fragments at first glance appears to be  arranged by  chance,  but keeping  in mind  the idea  of the  camera as  a  symbol-making machine, the curves seem to stand in relationship to one another as hieroglyphs or letters  of an  unknown language.  The shapes  also have  a  visual relationship  to formations which are  found in  the human  eye:  small floating  fragments which ordinarily go unnoticed,  but become  apparent against  a  uniform backdrop  (such as  a  blue sky), and perhaps come into optical focus only during a moment of mental abstraction. There is then, in the images, a sense of introspection: the seagrass can be seen as a stand -in for  a  layer  of  language  or  of  interior  imagery  which  comes  into  mental  focus  through transcendent thought.”

Thomas Cuckle in  "An impossible  analogue –  on the  photography of  Joe  Clark "

Joe Clark

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Joe Clark

London

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