Lost in Translation is an autoethnographic journey through the visual iconography of mid-century design and domestic space. Combining nostalgia with visual elements of uncanny disorientation, I aim to create images that appear decorative yet are charged with an underlying narrative and hidden truths.
By drawing on lived experience of visual and audible disturbance, these works play with the idea that perception is a singular and fixed experience. For example, by painting a large scale phone it prompts one to ask, is that just a phone? Why is it looming large and dominant? What does it want from me, and why doesn’t it stop ringing?
Experiences of disturbed perception can arise from a range of anxiety induced disorders, including mania, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, OCD, and PTSD. These works aim to redeploy and recast symptoms of perceptual disturbance as playful strategies in the planning of scale and composition, creating an encounter with the bizarre yet static, with the disturbance gradually assimilated over time.
I can trace my interest in distortion, scale and composition back to Ron Robertson Swann’s, Vault, made in 1979 for the city square and labelled The Yellow Peril, dividing public opinion until it was moved to the current site on the grounds of ACCA. I identified with the work from the moment I saw it, a deconstruction of simple planes into shifting and opposing angles which can represent the experience of visual distortion. Walls shifting, fluid and often on an axis are familiar to me.
I grew up the child of immigrants in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s, this body of work draws on these memories and my extensive collection of mid-century memorabilia. I inhabit my artistic process by living amongst assemblages of objects, often adding and removing items, taking photographs and digitally manipulating the images to create compositions for large scale paintings. In this way my experience of hypervigilance, heightened memory and sensitivity to light, sound and colour both informs the work and can be transformed through making.
Lost in Translation aims to filter and reimagine the past and allow space for further reflection, making sense of my place in a busy and often confusing world. Through transforming the disorientation and fragmentation of my personal journey into strategies for image making, I also resist the potential marginalisation of diagnoses and labels. I have come to realise that mental health is a universally fluid spectrum that we all navigate and to this end I am a passionate advocate and supporter of Beyond Blue and The Black Dog Institute.
instagram.com/karenyvetteclarke_kyc
Karen Yvette Clarke – Visual Artist
Private collections in Australia and The United Kingdom.
London Institute London UK 1994 – A Level Fine Art
Croydon College London UK 1995 – Diploma of Art & Design
Central Saint Martin’s College London UK 1996 – Adv Cert. Ed. Fine Art
RMIT Melbourne Australia – BA Fine Art (Painting)