Clare Graham: The Alchemical Archivist

Bottlecap Gehry, 2005, armature, wire, bottle caps, 27x18x18 inches, Photo Gary Brewer

By GARY BREWER December 28, 2023

“Their uselessness becomes their asset: they turn into totems and fragments of the lost worlds they came from.” Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

We live in a world where myriad objects and things are manufactured that have a purpose, a meaning and a place. In a short period of time, they will lose their usefulness and become remnants of another era. At an ever-increasing speed, the kaleidoscopic whirl of innovation leaves behind mountains of relics, some whose intrinsic characteristics may save them from oblivion. They may become artifacts of nostalgia, or highly crafted objects of wonder, whose original purpose has become obsolete, but contain an intrinsic beauty that will live on to be seen and savored in a different light.

I visited Clare Graham in his vast space, Moryork, in Highland Park, Los Angeles. It contains decades of Clare’s fascination with finding and collecting objects, paintings, natural wonders, dime store paintings, sculptures, rosaries, buttons, bones, meteors and more: indeed tens of thousands more! It is a sprawling Cabinet of Curiosities and a representation of his magnificent obsession with the aura that certain objects can contain.

His current exhibition of sculptural works is being shown in the studio of the artist Elliott Hundley, a studio that is in itself a ‘merzbau’. It is a vast industrial space, built in 1907: the distressed surfaces of its floors and walls expressing the patina of time. It is filled with books, art and objects of all kinds. It is a perfect venue for the work of Graham.

Clare Graham at his space Moryork in Highland Park, Los Angeles, Photo Gary Brewer

Early in our conversation, Graham was clear to point out that he is not an artist: he is a maker, a craftsman. As he put it, “My work has no meaning or purpose. I practice my craft daily as a way to preserve the things I value and collect. I find objects that have a quality that engages me and that I feel I can do something with. Years ago I bought a truckload of buttons. It took me five years of working with them to find a way to create something interesting. I take these things I collect and craft them into objects that have an aura, an aura that engages people and gives these artifacts a new life. When people collect my work it ensures that these things I love will live on into the future; otherwise, they will go to a landfill.”

Graham’s practice is in part as an archivist of artifacts, mixed with a compulsive need to make things, and the inherent desire to lovingly fashion objects into being. He employs traditional crafts, whose intrinsic value stands on terra firma and not within some rarified notions of aesthetic value.

His works are marvels of ingenuity and his ability to see something that others would overlook. Using the power of repetition, his sculptures use various identifiable objects: buttons, bottle caps, puzzle pieces and chewing gum, to create fanciful forms. They suggest a variety of cultural expressions including modernist abstraction, Tramp Art, and Tribal art. His eclectic love of design, from organic to mechanical, fuels a rich mélange of references in these highly original works.

In a piece such as Bottlecap Gehry, hundreds of soda bottle caps have been threaded together using wire in irregular columnar stacks that are arranged in rows that rise eccentrically in four tiers. Each of the top three tiers is made of vertical rows with a horizontal, serpentine row bracketing each ‘floor’ of this four-leveled structure. The bottom is a snaking foundation of mechanical viscera, whose girth holds the tower above upright. It is a marvel of sculptural invention: the self-assembling logic of one bottle cap neatly stacked one upon the other, suggesting a natural order. The effect is both suggestive of the title's namesake, the architect Frank Gehry, as well as organic structures seen at an atomic level or a strange artifact from the pantheon of early 20^th century industrial gadgets. It pulsates and undulates with life. It leans to one side, but one can feel that its weight anchors it in place. It is both itself, an assemblage of bottle caps, and a 19^th Century back-alley spacecraft from Jules Verne; an interstellar craft to travel from one world to another. There is an uncanny power to this work as it oscillates between the pedestrian worlds of usable, disposable things, into the realm of metaphor and alchemy.

Gum Tower,2018-2023, foundry mold, hardware cloth, cotton string, armature wire, chewing gum, chewing gum wrappers, 87x24x22 1/2inches, Photo Gary Brewer

Another piece Jigsaw Puzzle Amoeba, hangs from the ceiling, its organic appearance suggests plant forms like Spanish moss or lichens that hang from tree branches. Or it could be a science classroom model of the microscopic world, an intricate assemblage of molecules, the structural building blocks of some life form. Upon closer inspection, one sees that this piece is made entirely from thousands of puzzle pieces, threaded together in intertwined garlands loosely woven into a vertical sculpture. There is an echo of Ruth Asawa in this piece, an artist Graham greatly admires. But again, this interaction between the mundane and the poetic creates a fascinating tension; a friction between what is known as a matter of fact, and how human will and imagination can transform matter. Indeed magic is afoot in these wondrous fusions of objects that were originally manufactured to serve a specific temporal purpose, and now exist in a different sphere- their life spans have been extended into an indeterminate future.

The piece Gum Tower is a delightful marriage of elegance and humor. The looping arabesques of the linear sculpture reach into space, drawing lines that create an exquisite articulation of forms. They have a quality reminiscent of the bones of a bird that one might find on a wild beach, the animals, tides and sunlight washing away the flesh to reveal delicate inner structures. The tower also harkens to the celebratory towers of Simon Rodia as well. The pale white colors of this sculpture are made from chewing gum that has been chewed up and affixed, still wet with saliva, to an armature, in order to solidify into these wondrous flights of fancy. The pedestal is fabricated from a wire grid made for fences or cages; within each rectangular opening; the silver gum wrapper hangs, creating a shimmering pedestal for the sculpture to sit upon. It is a magical piece that exudes an aura; the playful choice of medium adds a shamanistic quality to the piece, the artificer imbuing the materials with their own body.

Jigsaw Puzzle Amoeba“ jigsaw puzzle pieces, wire, 90 x 46 x 1, photo by Gary Brewer.

I asked Graham if something in his youth inspired his interest in collecting and crafting objects into new and different forms. “I was raised in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada. Two thousand and nine hundred people lived there in the summer and only one thousand in the winter. It was a mining town and everyone worked in the mine. We lived a subsistence life- everything that we ate we hunted and fished for. We were resourceful and recycled things, finding some new purpose that they could be used for. It shaped my character to be both a craftsman and to find new ways to use the discarded things of this world, things that I find worthy of saving.”

Clare Graham’s work is grounded in a craft ethos. His interest is, in a sense, to curate a universe of abandoned things, things that stir something in him that he can rework, using the skills of a craftsman to fashion objects that will stir something in others. He uses wit and ingenuity to design sculptural forms whose internal relationships ring true. They are mysterious and convey an eccentric strangeness. Some have a celebratory quality and others have a delightful sense of humor. They all carry within them an idiosyncratic sensibility and a fascination that guides him in his search for objects to collect from this world. He is both an alchemist and an archivist. Graham uses his skills and imagination to forge new ways to see the world, to appreciate the intricate latticework of materials that appear and disappear through time, and to preserve them from vanishing into oblivion.

Clare Graham’s solo exhibition is at the studio/gallery of Elliott Hundley in Los Angeles, CA. The exhibition is open through March 2024. It is open by appointment only. Contact Elliott on Instagram/DM @elliotthundley to make an appointment to visit the gallery. WM