John Hurrell – 28 May, 2025

Clarke’s show is unusual, consisting of two long single-channel videos and three framed silver gelatin prints. The videos are the main attraction, for through the use of thermal sensors (not light) they successfully present swirling flocks of Hutton’s Shearwaters at night as these endangered creatures hover around their nests precariously positioned on the steep cliffs of Kaikōura, high up and well away from rats.

There is present a sense of continuous fluid motion—of restless unstoppable energy—for as moving scattered marks the flying birds look like a form of random gestural calligraphy through their suggestive abstract forms. Hence the title. When a few fly close to the camera, you can then detect fluttering wings as they soar across the lower screen, particularly when motion is slowed down and diagonal vectors are emphasised.

With the traversing points of heat-generated light we experience spatial depth, with each moving ‘constellation’ being unstable. The nearer ones are faster and the distant ones slower. Some winged ‘sparks’ are more blurred than others. The background field is pale at the bottom and darker at the top.

Sometimes Clarke exploits spatial ambiguity, using negative b/w forms to create viewer disorientation, flipping between looking out of a cliff cave entrance or peering in. The whole project revels in restless agitated movement, a little like Len Lye, celebrating bursts of jittery, sequenced, gliding, avian shape.

Clarke of course is careful not to disturb these vulnerable airborne animals with her filming, and has been helped by scientist and environmentalist Ted Howard, Chair of Hutton’s Shearwater Charitable Trust. With her two silent films, one is almost 26 mins long, the other almost 50.

Several questions arise about the nature of the films, specifically their duration. Such as perhaps they are akin to the lengthy experimental music pieces of the seventies composed and performed by Brian Eno, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young and others? However Clarke’s visual compositions are close to being stochastic and these musical forms aren’t. They have no interest in being random.

John Hurrell

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