MENTAL NOTES // Theodore Clarke

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Taken between 2015 and 2020, these images form a collection of quiet moments amid the tempest the world has witnessed these past five years. These are times of personal and global confusion, of uncertainty, times of excitement, times of exploration, of distress and delight. On offer here are pauses between the tumult. In places near to and far from home, Theodore Clarke has observed us, our artefacts and our monuments, silent witnesses to the speed of change. Here are his Mental Notes: hints at the toll we take upon the earth, and ourselves.

The works Theodore Clarke presents to us here are graphic notations, quiet and seemingly mundane excerpts from the last few years. They remind one of deleted scenes from a film, for a time forgotten but here for this exhibition they have been remembered and are now revitalised.

Much can and does happen within a period of five years. For Theodore Clarke, this was a time of exploration, adventures and adversities. In this series of images, place and space profile experience. Not faces, nor uproar nor action. The images appear to determinedly occupy their own silence – both serene and haunting. The scarce few who inhabit one or two frames are disengaged from the viewer, suspended in a limbo amid the fallout of world events. With all of the fracas and hardship humanity has faced in this past half decade, these images remove us to a place of reflection, resembling what a child may see looking out of a window in a daydream.

In compiling these images for exhibition, Clarke says he held within his mind the common feeling of the ‘loneliness one can feel in a crowd’. These photographs encourage us to consider this state of being, in its vague yet all consuming power. Clarke senses that we live in a time where this peculiar solitude has been keenly enhanced. A time where many, wittingly or otherwise, detach themselves from the great happenings affecting all of us, feeling alienated in their own environment and the people with whom they share it. By various means of escapism people look to different places and different times. Times that happened long ago, times that never happened or never will happen, all taking place far away or in places that may not even exist. In Clarke’s images these never-lands are questioned, they stand out and are naked of the time from which the photographer’s eye has hewn them.

In each of these works, there are points of expanse and exactitude, of the contemporary and of the timeless. Wherever in the world we are taken in these pictures, we find ourselves located in displacement - barely here or there. Perhaps this is coming to be a lasting condition of ours. What these images deliver is a provocation towards being mindful of our environment and towards being present to experience it in all its tainted glory.

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www.theodoreclarke.com