Every song the same

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 "