Tessa Clarke collects all kinds of everything to put together in her multi-media art work. Lee Morgan speaks to her about art and enchantment.
Tessa Clarke has taught her colleagues to collect sweet wrappers. She flattens them and stores them and keeps them until she can use them in her work. Tessa is a hoader, but more than that, she sees beauty in everything and waits until it can shine in her art.
There’s a kind of magic in a collection. And there’s an enchantment in keeping and storing a collection.
‘I collected Bibles when I was a child. I wasn’t pious. It was the paper. And I loved the gold. The parchment and the gold, and the whole preciousness of the book.
‘My granddad was a carpenter who had a real love of wood, and I used to collect boxes – I still do,’ says Tessa.
‘My gran was a hoarder, there were always things around that we could use. To others they’d look like unbelievable piles of junk.’
And out of that ‘junk’ came art.
‘Most of my work is trying to capture the feeling and beauty of nature and aspects of light,’ she says.
Tessa keeps her precious memories too, and all of it informs her art as well as her work as a teacher at Estover College.
‘Someone recently said “but you’re a teacher”,’ says Tessa. ‘I just replied that Kandinsky was a teacher and most of the masters were teachers.’
What better way to pass on her enthusiasm and passion for art than to be a teacher as well as a practitioner. and she talks about art as a great emotional release.
‘There’s a sense of relief. You can work through emotion in your work, especially if you’re angry or feeling frustrated. In my work, red represents anger, but it’s resolved anger.’
A turning point came in Tessa’s work during 2003 and 2005, and she emerged more immersed in producing art.
She trained as a weaver in Birmingham, and it was her love of surface that led her into the medium. Even now she demands total control of the surface.
‘I very rarely start with white paper,’ she says before describing embedding seaweed in paper, and twists and happy accidents that can take place from experimenting (for texture she suggest fruitnets or bottle tops). She has bags of shells, stones and sycamore leaves. She creates characters out of twigs and uses them to play with rhythms, tones and layers, giving her work different facets of meaning.
‘Different people see differently to me,’ she says. ‘My work is abstract enough for them to have their own interpetation.’
The interpretation can only be enhanced by the tactile, scratch and sniff nature of her pictures, and she often encourages the love of words – another of her collections. She’s been inspired by Wordsworth, haikus and even invents her own words.
It’s as if each event, and each image, is to be kept and put together to recreate the magic of the everyday. There are elements of enchantment that Tessa refers to – the annual trip to the Christmas Eve service at Kings College Chapel, Cambridge, for example – which combines with her joy in what is all around: the size of the sky, tickets, twigs as she casts her critical gaze at the ordinary.
Tessa’s also chairman of the Drawn to the Valley group of artistists. ‘As an artist there are times you feel isolated,’ she says, and being part of this professional, a highly motivated group can help keep focus.’
But focus is the one thing it seems Tessa doesn’t need. She’s also an avid photographer and her obvious passion to explore, decipher and touch the world around her is as tangible as some of her work.
And it’s something she doesn’t want to keep to herself. ust take a look at her pictures, or ask her collegues as they save the sweet wrappers.
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