48th Weekly Feature: Women Artists in Canada: Lori Clarke

[Jenina MacGillivray]

LORI CLARKE, St. Johns

Lori Clarke is an artist of electronic and acoustic music, film and video, installation and performance. Lori's series of work, SOMALORE, has received critical acclaim in performance events and international film festivals for its sensual and evocative qualities.

Statement

I am aroused by the process by which experience is shaped by culture and bodies, individual and collective. It is an engagement with the mappings of these bodies and the passions they express which comprise the terrain of my artistic practise.

My process is both research-based and intuitive. It is disciplined and passionate and like a tree it branches in spirals, in many directions and is subject to windy turbulence and the visitations of birds. My perspective is phenomenological, feminist and interdisciplinary.

My process embraces technology whenever it makes sense. It makes sense when either in the creation of sound, text, movement or image I meet a narrowing of the channel ahead and must expand in a new direction uncharted by previous journeys. It is in passion and with senses awakened that a new direction ignites and technologies of representation and expression are engaged, both to stoke the fire and to control its spread. It is often in a moment of crisis that such fires begin.

Crisis, in the world of my muse, is a crisis of passion and may be wed to love, sex, sleep, rage, spiritual exaltation or the pure delight of the senses. Crises of these sorts may be born from love, from the light of the sun passing through the branches of a tree above, from the folds of skin below an eye, from the veins jumping out from a flexed calf muscle, from the sound of a child's song, from the flavours of a beautifully prepared meal or from the profound tragedy of loss. It may belong to me personally or haunt me from a dream of collective significance, from music, film or war.

It is the principle of the transferability of excitation, according to Ian Grand, which is in play at the juncture of a crisis. This principle is not unlike those governing neuro-chemical or electrical currents, requiring a charge to leap from one object to another in order to continue either on a path of least resistance or in directed continuity within an enclosed circuit. At the rift created by a crisis in passion there is only movement. Whether the movement manifests as a physical charge such as anxiety, a psychic charge or emotional experience, as sexual energy, as the experience of overwhelming beauty, rage, or fear or as accessible creative energy, it is all movement. When there is such movement the waters are turbulent and one must not battle against them for to do so would be to risk being beaten against the rocks.

Lori Clarke: Somalore April 02, 2006
Somalore is an archived installation art project, rendered for the web.
It preserves three works of St. John's artist Lori Clarke.

Somalore