This series of small prints are presented in an almost museological scientific display, showing the fears and anxieties a mother faces surrounding birth. Looking at the 16th century medical drawings of anatomy the images are all fictional wombs, each hovering in a foreign landscape. Every image represents a different fear different women told me they felt during their pregnancy, from deformity to still birth, to nightmares of alien creatures inhabiting their bodies. These images attempt to fictionalise, beautify and banish those fears in the process.

Thats the Way to do It is a series of work exploring the traditional and usually very violent puppet show of Punch and Judy. Using a bizarre family as a vehicle for grotesque comedy and a sideways look at our contemporary society. Creating a dysfunctional cast of characters using theatrical imagery the work questions the nature of the spectacle as much as its representation.

The work seeks a common trait - the orifices - for it is within these orifices that the confines of the body are overcome. The body of work The Cadaver Room consists of a central alter piece sculpture - a 14 sided sphere, upon where the boundaries of each facet divide one body from the other at their points of intersection. One body offers its death, the other its birth - and in doing so they are merged. The large 8 sided aluminium sculpture Octopoda looms over the viewer, its hard cold edges contrasted with the soft gooey Octopus tentacles etched into its surface. Nets have been printed from the sculpture and provide an ordered dissection of the piece, in these we see the grotesque body laid out, unraveled and exposed. Larger than life specimens H.12 12 and H.124 look at the grotesque body under the knife at the butchers table.

The following works were made for the online project with Rented by the Hour called ‘Home Sweet Home’. All works were made during Lockdown 2020, in the artists home.

Clarke reflects on the lack of privacy in the home as a mother. Disembodied hands of the artists children reach out of the sides of the bathtub, while the figure turns away, her body melting into the milky water to escape touch, and rejecting also the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer. In ‘Hands, Face, (no) Space’ Clarke explores feelings of claustrophobia as a mother in Lockdown. Offering a candid and ambiguous portrait of the artist hiding amongst hundreds of casts of tiny hands.

‘I wanted to make work that looked at the ritual of cleansing. In our house the bathtub is part of a nighty ritual before bed, but like every activity in our house it is not a private affair. This image shows how virtually impossible physical space is as a mother of small children. Liminality is created through the use of breastmilk; a cleansing, healing potion, but also the very thing that often leads me to feel ‘touched out’.’

Not for Small Children

‘Bestiality is omnipresent -  in art, in science, in history, in our dreams – but our gaze is averted, our giggles suppressed. Instinct will out, as long as it remains below the surface.'

 Dekkers, M, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality