Plasticine has been used as an expanded drawing medium in Clarke’s practice since 2012. Temporary drawings are created, then eventually destroyed. The plasticine is stored to be reused at a later date. At each site the plasticine accrues dust and debris, thereby embodying traces of each installation site. As the plasticine travels and ages, it greys in much the same way as the artist.
1. Sally Clarke, The Void (NAS, Sydney), 2017, plasticine, 350 x 350cm. Photo: Sally Clarke. 2: Sally Clarke/Chelsea Farquhar, 2017 (Adelaide). 3: Sally Clarke, Drawing the Void. Photo: Lynne Eastaway
Sally Clarke, Snake Charmer 2, 2016, plasticine, fishing line, 400 x 30cm (at widest point, floor level). Photo: Margaret Roberts.
Sally Clarke, Memory Machine (Mobile Gallery) 2016, plasticine on car window. Photos: Sally Clarke.
Memory Machine (Mobile Gallery) 2016 transforms the car into both a mobile camera and gallery. From its interior the observed world is captured in plasticine outlines, allowing the memory of one place to be relocated and layered over another, whether that be an actual place or through the layering or collision of drawings. The drawings are destroyed from time to time, through melting heat, by the need to wind the window down, by dogs pawing or through my desire for change. Viewers from the outside of the car see my memories in reverse, they never see what was originally observed, in the way the artist did. Even passengers in the car will see the drawing in a different context, from a different perspective. The lines will never match its original subject again.
Sally Clarke, Beast People (details), 2016, plasticine, chemistry glassware, variable dimensions. Photos: Sally Clarke
Sally Clarke, Bush Incantation (She Bush), 2015, plasticine on wall, 275 x 450cm. Photos: Fiona Susanto
Sally Clarke, Big Cow 2, 2014, plasticine on wall, 150 x 150cm. Photos: Luminere Imaging
Sally Clarke, Snake Charmer, 2014, plasticine, glass, 275 x 120cm. Photos: Luminere Imaging
Sally Clarke, Equal Parts, 2014, plasticine, variable dimensions. Photos: Sue Blackburn.
Sally Clarke, still lost, 2013, plasticine, 12 x 60cm. Photo: Sally Clarke
Sally Clarke, Big Cow, 2012, plasticine, 100 x 100cm. Photos: David Eastwood
Big Cow is a reference to the term ‘cow’ that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas reportedly used as their secret code for orgasm.
Sally Clarke 