Artist David Clapham reflects on the places his career has taken him, and memory: inherant, inherited, and recollected.

David Clapham is a contemporary British Artist whose career has spanned a wide range of entrepreneurial and creative output, including 10 years working in corporate and broadcast media as a documentary filmmaker. In 1976 he co-founded the Bridewell Studios complex in Liverpool, which helped to launch the careers of artists such as Ian McKeever and Anish Kapoor. The range and scope of his involvement in the media and Fine Arts is impressive as his intellectual curiosity makes him always ready to explore new ideas. It was Clapham who, whilst lecturing at Liverpool Polytechnic, invited Yoko Ono to perform her famous ‘happening’ at the Bluecoat Chambers in 1967.

His career has taken him to diverse and sometimes risky places in the world and the search for a safe place and an edge of uncertainty permeate his images to this day.

As well as a studio at Bow Road, Clapham has had a studio in Central Portugal for 20 years. He now lives between there and London Docklands. The rivers in both these places provide an underpinning source of imagery that is woven throughout his work and overlaid with evolving narrative themes. This collection of work includes his latest large paintings made up of several panels, shimmering installations and a selection of works from over two decades of output many of which have a common theme of water and ‘Rivers Running Through’

What has been your biggest inspiration for your pieces?

It is only when you complete an exhibition that you experience the full recognition of what you have achieved and the general direction your work is going in. In my latest installation pieces I deal with different levels of transparencies, and by utilising the modern printing techniques using voile as a base material I’m able to build a lightweight sculptural form. This incorporates my painted images and allows fluidity and movement in the image.

This fluidity is drawn from observation of the rivers, Ceira and Thames. In Portugal where we live in the mountains the rapid changes of light and weather are in marked contrast to the flatness of London light. This is mirrored in the cultural beliefs and superstitions that influences the way we feel and live in each place. I am concerned by inherited memory, I’m not looking at nature to represent what we all see. It is looking through the lens of history and recollection that sets in motion a series of memories, of a moment in time, a passage of a particular day, a particular colour, with it’s inherent memories that represent a true reality, and is intended to convey feelings of history and the present in a single juxtaposition’.

How did filmmaking contribute to your inspiration for your art pieces?

My installation pieces developed from a series of small box shapes with painted images on the sides, incorporating narrative themes originated in Birkenhead and Aylesbury. I used them to incorporate forest fire images from 2017 in Portugal and also black and white images from the footage of the Ukrainian conflict. These seem to me to share common emotions and have developed from 3D paintings into large hanging pieces, 3 metres long, aluminium frames draped with semi-transparent printed voile that gives a feeling of water and movement.

These pieces have not been exhibited in their entirety before and were constructed on site at the Williamson Gallery and suspended from the ceiling for the Exhibition The River Runs Through.

Read more about David’s work at The Williamson Gallery, or on his website.