Conor Clarke

Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1982
Kāi Tahu, Māori

Twin Peaks, Berlin

  • 2014
  • C-type print
  • Gift of the Friends of Christchurch Art Gallery, 2017
  • 694 x 614mm
  • 2017/010

Conor Clarke was living in Berlin when she came across a pile of sand in a building site. Intrigued by how it resembled the contours of an epic landscape – like those she remembered from her home in Te Waipounamu – she framed and captured it with her analogue camera. Later, she digitised and manipulated the image until her ersatz mountain range dominated the composition in the eighteenth-century European picturesque tradition. The result is beautiful, but deeply uncanny – a sensation Clarke plays up in the title with a reference to David Lynch’s cult 1990s mystery-horror television series.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

Exhibition History