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
Location: Sir Robertson and Lady Stewart Gallery
Tags: monochrome, mountains, snow (precipitation)
With its cascading eroded rivulets and slopes lit by raking light, Conor Clarke’s majestic photographic composition pays tribute to notions of the picturesque and the sublime, like the painted landscapes in this room. However, as the title reveals, the origins of this work are in industrial Germany, where Clarke spent ten years from 2009. As she explained at the time, “I photograph piles of sand and dirt from the streets and construction sites of Berlin. I then select and re-combine these objects into landscape compositions based on [the] picturesque ideal.” This work is from her Scenic Potential series, a collection she described as “landscapes of contradiction”, which was awarded best series at the London-based Renaissance Photography Prize in 2015.
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)
Exhibition History
Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- 21 July 2024
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.