Artist Clive Knights
Congratulations to Clive Knights for earning his place as a Finalist in the Boynes Emerging Artist Award 7th Edition!
Who are you?
I am an Englishman living in Portland, Oregon, USA, where, over the last 27 years, I have created, founded and directed a new school of architecture at Portland State University. My educational background is in architecture and philosophy and I have lived the life of an academic for the bulk of my professional career. However, I am also a devoted collage artist and have made collages as a pastime all my adult life while also making the genre a mainstay of my design teaching agenda as a way for students to explore all the intangible, experiential and metaphorical possibilities of architectural space, the aspects so often overlooked by a profession dominated by expedient technology and an obsession with invention for its own sake espoused by the myth of the genius. I have been in a period of transition over the last few years to begin the process of establishing my art studio and participating in public exhibitions to nurture an art practice that has now become the love of my life and which I hope soon to turn into a full time commitment.
“Ness”
Paper Collage on Cradled Wood Panel
By Clive Knights
What inspired you to utilize collage as a medium?
I believe collage is the most egalitarian of the visual arts, available to anyone with an imagination (so that’s everybody), some discarded paper and some glue (so that’s most people).
It is almost as accessible, I would say, as song and dance, the means for which we all literally embody. We can be taught particular techniques of song and dance, certainly, but we don’t have to be in order to experience the pleasure of singing and dancing. In collage, anyone can pick up some papers and some glue and start rearranging the world they find into the world they imagine, pushing reality toward possibility.
Collage is also, I believe, as ubiquitous as the language arts such as poetry, for which it bears even greater resemblance, and we’ve all written poetry at some point in our lives. The collage artist deploys fragments of existing meaning embodied in found images and aims to synthesize these into new configurations of meaning, much like we deploy the fragments of meaning embodied in the currency of spoken or written words in whatever language we happen to speak, and forge those into original arrangements to communicate new meanings.
“Narratalia: City of Myths”
Paper Collage on Cradled Wood Panel
By Clive Knights
How would you describe your artwork?
In making a collage I extemporize from the beginning until the gathered paper fragments start to incite a theme or narrative which might then loosely direct the selection of further fragments to complete the work. I prefer to build a concrete array or field with papers of different surface qualities, textures, shapes and colours, free of easily recognizable imagery. If an image is instantly recognizable it can distract from the whole and weaken the metaphoric capacity of the work as it will tend to dominate. So, images have to be carefully dissected to offer partial recognition, preferably mis-recognition, as this will open up avenues towards rejuvenated interpretations.
I often liken the making of a collage to the unfolding of a conversation. The artist and each paper fragment are the participants. As with any good conversation the meaning only emerges in the shared space formed by the various contributors, while the outcome of a conversation can never be known before it happens, before the disparate parties find common agreement in a new synthesis of understanding, even if they disagree. To preempt a conversation is to kill its potency. To pre-plan a collage does much the same thing. You can see how this attitude might generate some tension in a school of architecture where I teach, and where we’re supposed to plan everything!
“Le Guin 1”
Paper Collage on Paper
By Clive Knights
Can you discuss the inspiration and thought process behind "Minster"?
‘Minster’ is a paper collage over gesso on a 12” x 48” cradled wood panel. It is one of a series of pieces under the general title of Autochthonous Cities that I made for my very first solo show that took place in September 2021 at a gallery in Portland.
The Autochthonous Cities are the result of a kind of stewardship, on my part, of intimations of newly born landscapes and settlements as they emerge from the detritus of print media produced by civil society. They are fictions, for sure, since the cities are only implied in the pushing and pulling of matter above and below the surface, that edge between earth and atmosphere, soil and air, the chthonic and the celestial, where human life plays out. But, if you let your imagination run free across the topography of each work, you’ll encounter the nascent evidence of transformation, the continuing duet of entropy and cultivation: building and dilapidating, constructing and excavating, piling and hollowing, towering and penetrating, reaching and nesting.
Human cultures for millennia have recognized value in the success of this dance, in this partnership, in the balanced give-and-take between human and world. Until, that is, the industrialized world began to coerce and dominate its dance partner, drain it of its energies, consume its gifts without reciprocation, and burden its once vital limbs with the increasing residue of selfish exploitation. The visions of cities explored in the Autochthonous Cities series are not nostalgic, they are intended to be vital and burgeoning, transformational, underway, becoming. Their titles reference deep etymological roots in the language human beings use to name their relationship with found terrain, in this case, since I am from England, the Old English terms that refer to land conditions and which have become embedded in thousands of place names, from the humblest homestead to the greatest cities, amidst the setting in which I was born and raised.
‘Minster’ references many of the institutions that form within human settlements, that are cultivated from the found conditions of the landscape, and that we identify as cities. For instance, references to law, theatre, worship, economy, play, organization, are manifest through fragments that suggest a predicament for these institutions that is ambiguously poised between generation and degeneration. I believe that institutions only maintain their efficacy and meaning for a community if they are constantly reinterpreted, reimagined, and remade in response to the diversity and dynamics of the populace.
“Minster”
Paper Collage on Cradled Wood Panel
By Clive Knights
Can you walk us through the technical steps of creating "Minster"?
The sides of the 1.5 inch deep cradled wood panel were first varnished with 3 coats of water-based polyurethane and the surface was given 4 coats of gesso.
The paper fragments being collaged were taken from my piles of found print media as well as hand-printed papers that I had made earlier as a series of coloured and textured swatches that could find their way into any new work. I began by drawing a fine, precise pencil line horizontally across the panel to mark an implied horizon from which applied fragments would either reach up or root down to imply, respectively, engagement with sky and earth. I improvised a layout of primary papers to suggest a landscape as if cut-through in section, gluing them down with matte gel medium. I then superimposed smaller details taken from engravings and other book illustrations to add further reference to the institutional realities of cities.
“Le Guin 2”
Paper Collage on Paper
By Clive Knights
What do you hope to communicate to an audience with your work?
I want to remind the audience that a work of art demands their imaginative participation in the elucidation of its meaning and that ‘seeing something as something else’ is the grounding of the possibility of common understanding, that is, seeing likeness in things that at first appear to differ. This metaphoric movement, that only works with participation, is the foundation of language, and thus, I believe, the basis of the very possibility of human community: to recognize commonality in difference without eradicating the continuity of that difference. Collage intrinsically engages this dynamic, perpetually poised between synthesis and divergence, between an idea of unity and its exquisite impossibility.
I also hope to communicate to those who experience my work that identities are revealed by forging outward gestures towards others and the worldly context they inhabit rather than looking inward for some mythic kernel of selfhood. A grouping of self-absorbed individuals is not a community. I hope my work manifests such outward gestures.
“Le Guin 3”
Paper Collage on Paper
By Clive Knights
Can you talk about your biggest learning experience during the process of creating your work?
The biggest lesson I have had to learn is how to play. Having spent a career in architecture where we are taught to control every last detail, to predict every outcome ahead of time, to minimize risk through rigorous pre-planning, learning to release myself into an arena of playful experimentation has been a fascinating and liberating struggle.
I invoke the wisdom of the great German hermeneutic philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer when speaking of beauty where he reminds us of the importance of ‘play’ in the pursuit of art. Play is not frivolous, genuine play is about imaginatively participating in a situation in which one did not make the rules.
Play in life begins with a creative engagement with the orders of bodily necessity – the need to breath, to seek nourishment, to rest, to be cleansed, to procreate, and so on – amidst the orders of the cosmos – the passage of the sun, the moon, the night sky, the cycles of the seasons, the movement of water, the shifting of topography and so on. These are themes that have inspired the art of all cultures throughout history.
“Le Guin 4”
Paper Collage on Paper
By Clive Knights
Can you discuss your biggest success since starting your artistic journey?
Being accepted to my first artist residency experience in July 2022, stands as a rubicon in my burgeoning artistic sensibility. I learned the true value of cross-disciplinary collaboration, focused studio time, and the inimitable nurturing and inspiring influence of the particular group of co-residents that one is fortunate to be placed alongside. The experience at Chateau d’Orquevaux reinforced the sense of value in my own work when enriched by a dialogue with others. I think I knew this innately having been a teacher all my life, but I had not reflected upon the idea in relation to my own studio practice. As irreplaceable as ‘alone time’ in the studio can be, the work produced there is in danger of remaining a solipsistic obsession without a conversation with others, before, during and after the fact. And if the imagination of those others can be recruited into the process of creating then the impact upon the outcome will almost certainly be unanticipated, and amplified.
“Imbecilia: City of Fools”
Paper Collage on Cradled Wood Panel
By Clive Knights
What projects are you working on currently? Can you discuss them?
Over the past year I have been creating about 70 new collages commissioned by a fine press publisher who asked me to create new artwork to accompany a limited edition, slip-cased, letterpress edition of a well-known short story by the incredible, late, Portland-based writer Ursula K Le Guin. Eight of these collages will be selected for inclusion in the fine press edition due out in the new year, and the whole collection will be published as an accompanying book. I will include some of these collages in the selections attached to this email.
“Itinerant’s Map of Utopia”
Paper Collage on Paper
By Clive Knights
What is your dream project or piece you hope to accomplish?
My dream is simply to keep working, that is, making collages, and to give up my day job. The best piece of work will always be the next one, the one yet to be made, the one waiting in the wings for the opportunity to show itself. I feel like a steward ushering new collaborations of paper fragments into existence, as if they are waiting for me to bring into visibility the tacit relationships they are already attempting to reveal but just need an agent (me), some glue and a surface to gather upon.
“Mother in the Catacombs [triptych]”
Paper Collage on Paper
By Clive Knights
As a finalist, do you have any advice for artists who want to submit to awards, competitions, residencies, etc.?
I would give other artists the same advice I gave my two sons growing up, and that I learned myself the hard way, that every rejection is the necessary stepping-stone to the better opportunity that is, as yet, over the horizon, but to which you have just moved one stride closer. Persist, but expect that your work will not always fit the priorities of a review committee, and that it does not mean the work is invalidated, it just fits elsewhere, and that place will inevitably be discovered along the journey of your art practice if you are patient and dedicated to doing work that you believe in.
“Mere”
Paper Collage on Cradled Wood Panel
By Clive Knights
Lastly, I like to ask everyone what advice they would give to their fellow artists/photographers, what is your advice?
Be true to your imagination as it engages outwardly from yourself to others and the worldly context you share. Art is not self-expression. The truth art can offer does not reside inside the self, it is embodied in the intermediaries we fabricate in the space between ourselves, revealing who we are in the interplay of self and other that artworks, I believe, are most suitably intended to accomplish.
To view more of Clive Knight’s work