Transparent Collection: Thomas A. Clark, ‘Evening Light’ undated

‘Evening Light’

Thomas A. Clark (b. 1947)
Enamelled Plaque

222 x 302

Undated

Purchase from Cairn Gallery

£150.00

2013.007

I bought this on the 15 January 1997 in ‘Art97’ at the Business Design Centre in Islington from Thomas who at the time was running the Cairn Gallery in Gloucester. He didn’t really look like he was enjoying the event.

In black writing on a dark blue ground (that you really have to make an effort to read) is written:

You are invited to sit here

for a while and remember

a place, a landscape or

a quality of evening light.

It’s a poem (a sentence) that has been made rather than written, being conceived of as an instruction to the reader.

Cairn Gallery had support from the Contemporary Art Society to be at the Art Fair and represented a quiet, well-mannered alternative to the attention seeking horror of the cast flayed corpses on show at the hideous Jibby Beane Gallery (Plod took an interest thereby helping the hype) and the frantic jizz of the YBA thing going on downstairs and of course in the wider context of the bigger jizz going on in the country at large.

The cynical ‘enabling’ (exploitation) of ‘aspiration’ (greed) by the newly elected government which to me carried echoes of Thatcher’s mobilisation of the ‘yuppies’ a decade earlier, was similarly buzzing around the whole country from its epicentre in Islington.

I actually hate art fairs and at them I tend to seek refuge in material that is quiet in nature or which distracts from what is actually going on. This year I managed a whole 25 minutes in Elizabeth Price’s installation at MOT at Frieze thinking at the time that it was good, but now wondering whether it was mainly because it was darkly lit, intensely seductive and comfortable to sit in.

Cairn Gallery were on my radar because Abbot Hall, where I then worked as Curator, had just presented a show of James Hugonin’s paintings. The Clarks also had an association with Simon Cutts and Coracle who I knew through Audrey Barker. I recall that James and I discussed at length the need to re-frame some of James’ paintings that had just been shown there replacing jarring mitred corners with butt joined corners in the occasional style of Ben Nicholson. James had these works re-framed for our show with Alan Harvey who I also used at that time.

In the file I have on the plaque (which has been left untended until today) there is a Goods Pass Out form from the art fair. It doesn't record what I paid for it, or when it was made. I think it was made around that year and I paid about £150. The file also contains a Cairn Gallery pamphlet ‘In Praise of Walking’ (1988) and I’m wondering whether that too should become part of the ‘Transparent Collection’ simply because it is fantastic - it was a giveaway.

‘Evening Light’ was one of a number of similar plaques that Clark had made and installed in public and private places. At the art fair it was appropriately close to a chair and on bending down to peer at the plaque I did feel invited to sit down and do just that. It is an experience I repeat almost daily.

Since then the plaque has always been on the wall somewhere in our houses. For the last 8 years it has been next to the chair at which I eat my breakfast. I love it because it constantly invites a reverie disengaging the here and now. On Cairn editions website there is a short essay ‘On Imaginative Space’. If instructions on how to look at it were needed, these are they.

Since 2002 Cairn Editions has been based in Pittenweem. It’s not very open but you can go if you want, ring first.