There are a number of widely-reported ‘secrets’ to Walt Disney’s parks, part of a popular mythology surrounding the resorts. Beneath The Magic Kingdom there is a network of passages which enable staff and cast members to move about the park unseen. Aside from their tantalizing appeal as secret and unseen parts of the park, they are entirely functional as utility passages; as a result you will never see Captain Hook passing through Tomorrowland, or Snow White skipping through Frontierland’s Old West scenery. It might spoil that magical moment, which other tricks are used to enhance. Throughout Disney’s parks, special olfactory technology called ‘smellitzers’ are used to pump out scents which add to the fantasy. The smell of freshly baked vanilla cookies wafts down Main St., while you may notice fresh airborne waves of sea salt when queuing for Pirates of the Caribbean. In any Disney park you are never further than 30 steps away from a rubbish bin, the maximum distance Walt Disney himself decided any guest was willing to hold on to their potential litter. Chewing gum is not sold anywhere. The parks are always spotless.
‘I’m really interested in themed environments and it just happens that Disney is the best at that. But it’s not really the Disney thing, I’m not interested in Mickey Mouse. I’m interested in the recreation, leisure, artificiality. Because Disney does all of those things better than anyone else, so for that it is the Mecca. I went in March last year — always under the premise of art research, but of course I went on the rides as well.’
The artist Kitty Clark and I were drawn to the concepts of fantasy and artificiality as we discussed the sculptural works for which she is best known.
Detail from ‘Spare Them’ (2012)
‘My favourite ride is the Haunted Mansion. There’s a fun fact about Disneyland, if you work on one of the rides, you can apply to work on a different ride, and the Haunted Mansion is the most over-subscribed ride to work on, because it’s the only one where you don’t have to smile as part of the job. It’s actually part of the character to look angry and upset. You don’t have to put on a fake smile to work there. People get sick of being happy all the time. They have a nice uniform as well, they have to wear a kind of Gothic Lolita pinny.’
I had arrived very late that evening. There was a Tube strike, and when franticly opting to seek out our Shoreditch meeting place on foot, I got lost. I had run through the rain for at least a mile, recording equipment in tow, and was flustered and sweating. She was cool, possessing a kind of confident ease. She was also very gracious and kind about my lateness. We settled ourselves at a large table around which other pairs were cosying up together in the chattering gloom. The rough wooden table was dressed with white candles plugged into large clear glass bottles coated in a buildup of mottled wax. She apologised for the noise, having forgotten about the need for quiet to record our interview.
She was wearing a grey roll-neck sweater, black skinny jeans, a leather jacket was draped over the back of her chair. With bleached blonde hair to her shoulders, she had a slight air of the 60s. She reminded me a little of Pauline Boty. Alongside the faintly beatnik air there was also a hint of girlish glamour, her nails were flawlessly painted in monochrome leopard print spotted with ice cream accents, lemon, mint, blueberry, rose.
‘We’re #1′ (2013), Risograph print
Clark graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2011, and lives and works in London. Our conversation began with her recently completion of the inaugural year of the School of the Damned, an unaccredited, free Fine Art MA program run by its students. Meeting twice a month for studio crit sessions, guest lectures and reading group seminars, the School aims to offer artists the peer review and critical exchange of a postgraduate practice-based degree, without any of the enormous cost. For Clark, the time taken as a group to reflect on work is one of its greatest advantages, ‘It’s a very generous amount of time, compared to what you’d get elsewhere. I don’t know exactly, but judging from comments of other people, it’s quite rare to get two plus hours of solid seminar time devoted to yourself.’ At least one School of the Damned student had started a fee-paying university MA, but the School’s manifesto rejects that system: ‘by its existence the course acts as a form of protest against a plutocratic state, which preserves aristocracies, promotes rampant avarice and marginalises the poor, dismantling their institutions and restricting their access to learning.’
Does this underground art school have its own aesthetic, I ask, thinking of its distinctive, sardonically demonic animated GIF logo. ‘It would be stupid to pretend that there wasn’t some kind of theme there. Actually, they’ve just been making the diplomas for the graduation, and they’re signed in pig’s blood, with human hair. So, it would be silly to try and pretend that wasn’t part of it. But I think that’s all in the spirit and attitude of the course, being vaguely anarchic. Or maybe not vaguely. It’s ok to be just anarchic.’
After a year on the program, and with the class of 2015 starting that weekend, Clark spoke firmly about the commitment needed to be involved in the School, ‘The people involved have to be dedicated. They have to be willing to give up their time and to be generous with their thoughts. Because it won’t work if everyone just turns up and doesn’t say anything. And that’s the problem with a lot of courses people do go on, they’ve paid their money so they feel like they don’t really have to do anything. Sometimes you get really good groups of people who have a really good discussion dynamic, but sometimes you’re in that situation where everyone’s silent, and you end up just talking about your own work for an hour’. She spoke with the kind of pragmatic conviction that borders on weariness, as though the School had for her been both a fated stride forward and most necessary of sacrifices, a corollary to making artworks amidst the kind of lack of hope and mass languor that has infected our generation, a result of a short-changed inheritance of debt, unemployment and boredom.
‘Trouble in Paradise’ (2011), Emergency blanket, arrow, inverted mousehole / tombstone
When asked about her working schedule, with full-time employment in a firm in Old Street as well as a studio practice, stamina is not an issue, ‘I’m a very energetic person, even when I’m at work I’m twisting around in my chair because I am so used to moving all the time. So I think, actually, when I get home I’ve got excess energy, so I’m ready to keep going.’ This energy glitters throughout our conversation, for although she remains seated very still, long limbs draped angularly over each other in a naturally elegant pose, I can tell that her mind is constantly busy. ‘The best way to be a productive artist is to be comfortable in your living surroundings and your lifestyle, but have an uncomfortable mind, to be intellectually challenged by life.’ A mutual friend of ours had given her this idea, and it had struck a chord. A nine-to-five was a small sacrifice of time to enable her the security to pursue her art making.
Before working full-time, Clark had been working freelance in commercial food photography, technical food preparation for advertising — Cool! I exclaimed. I had always wanted to meet someone with this job so I could ask them — Is it really true that to make food look hot — ‘Yep’ (she had fully anticipated my gleeful question) — they put a tampon — ‘Yep‘ — soaked in boiling water behind the food, to make it look steaming? — ‘Yeah, I wish I could say that it was a more scientific or technical,’ she was casual, ‘but no, that is definitely true. So that was one of the jobs I would have to do, to go and microwave a tampon.‘ — It is very gratifying to have that confirmed, I quipped, immediately anxious that I had belittled her clearly very specialist expertise. The kind of exacting, precise skills Clark would have needed for this is evident throughout her sculptural work of the last few years. In the world of commercial food photography, it is not about shooting food that looks homemade, or lovingly prepared, or realistic, or even edible — it’s about the object looking perfect.
‘I think that’s maybe where the link comes in with the freelance work I was doing, because I’d say it’s kind of… in search of perfection. Trying to achieve this ideal thing, an ideal object. A lot of the stuff I make is quite cartoony and almost unreal. I’d love it if they were virtual objects or things that would exist in a computer game or something. Because they are representational, but the majority of them are made out of MDF, so they are very fake, artificial. If someone picked them up they would be too light. A bit wrong.’ This shows in works like ‘Spare Them’, a sandwich of MDF and corrugated green plastic sits insouciantly atop an acid yellow plinth speckled with flecks of grey, like a Simpsons sarcophagus, or a Wacky Races podium. But it is too easy to describe Clark’s works as cartoon-like. There is something about them that is altogether more strange and unsettling, more nuanced, more equivocal, and above all else, more stylish. The high finish of these sculptures seem to capture within them a rippling tension between the mythical and the real.
‘Not Quite Midnight’ (2013), alongside spray-painted work by Stefan Sadler
Last year Clark had an exhibition at Xero, Kline & Coma alongside Stefan Sadler, a fellow artist, and also her boyfriend. ‘It’s a bit twee to do a show together, but a lot of our work is quite related. And the work I did for that was very much in this vein of unreal and real objects. So I made a table that was broken in half and it was completely made of MDF’ — I asked whether these works took as long as I imagined — ‘It is time-consuming work. I painstakingly made the break more perfect. Because if you break MDF it’ll just give you a really fuzzy, straight break and I wanted it to be that classic ziggy-zaggy broken edge. So I cut it in that shape and then used carved foam.’
While exactingly crafted with technical precision, the works appear to have been pared down, reduced to an essential, more stylised form. There is something luxurious about their simplicity, a rupture with reality that gives them their uncanny allure. They balance on a knife-edge between fantasy and nightmare, always about to topple; many of Clark’s pieces speak tacitly of violence or destruction. A silver foil emergency blanket pinned to the wall by a black arrow. A black tombstone balanced impossibly on its semi-circular top edge. A slashed and frayed red cord rope suspended from the ceiling, just hanging by a few threads. Are these destructive gestures? ‘I try and channel teenage angst. Especially those black objects. Just the act of painting something black is such a base gesture, that I really believe in. Solid black. I wanted to go back to the spirit of that. Being quite angry. Even better I thought, I’m going to break them. But, they are going to be perfectly broken. It didn’t work for me to just make something and actually break it, it would have to be made broken.’
‘He Managed to Escape’ (2012), Polypropylene rope
This is the dark side of the coin while its counter is the sweetness and light of cartoons, Disneyland, girlish nostalgia. But there is something else, something entirely compelling about creating broken objects, making the imperfect perfected; objects which have never undergone any kind of trauma. Clark’s work shows a deep love for and fascination with the macabre, but also a spiritual questioning. ‘I have an interest in how humans deal with death, which is such a cheesy thing to say, an interest in life and death. It’s a kind of spiritual yearning from someone who grew up as a complete atheist with this desire to find meaning in death. Or at least examine death and how we deal with it. I think that’s why I’ve always loved Halloween. I’m fascinated by our total acceptance of the celebration of death, and yet really, British society is quite dysfunctional with attitudes.’ Happy Halloween, grins a string of bared black teeth, a recent online work.
‘Bad Dream’ (2014), Sharks Teeth
Lately Clark has been enjoying working on smaller, less physically demanding pieces. She has been involved with The Institute of Jamais-Vu’s collaboration with Basic Space in Dublin. The exhibition ‘Star Wars’ (from 27/1/14 – 7/2/14) is an ongoing re-enacting of George Lucas’ story, the project space transformed from a white cube to a completely green-screened environment. Clark’s contribution is in the accompanying catalogue, she wrote a poem about Princess Leia. ‘It’s about imagining her death. I ended up writing a haiku. Because I knew I wanted to write something, something that was just short and sweet. I’ll show you.’ The image on her iPhone was of three lines of white text on a black background, slanted like the opening titles of Star Wars, as though moving away from the screen. ‘It’s a bit sad, of course.’ She added, ‘They’ve got a Star Wars expert to explain all of the reasons why it couldn’t happen, or why it shouldn’t happen.’
The Princess lay down
She died of a broken heart
A long time ago
I read the poem aloud and smiled. ‘I wanted to show it to you rather than telling you, it’s quite visual.‘ — So does Han Solo leave her? — Clark was cool as ever. ‘I guess so. I wanted to keep it clear.’ — Well, leopards, spots. — All I can think to mumble as I realise the thought of Leia dying broken hearted had actually caused me a twinge of pain. That bastard, I thought, I knew it. ‘Yep.’ Clark is serene.
‘Lucky’, 2012
Whether sculpture, photography or haiku, Clark’s work always operates in a playful register. She isn’t so convinced. ‘Even those really colourful fun objects were all basically in the shapes of tomb stones and graves. So it’s not like they’re ever really that fun.’ — It seems like a kind of deadpan, I suggest. ‘Lucky’, the bowl of milk precariously balanced on a broken shelf, as though it’s about to fall, to topple, there’s this kind of… a joke I guess — I trail off, I’ve used the wrong word and I know it. ‘I’m glad that seems like a joke and not a trick.’ She frowns, sounding almost irritated. ‘Because I really don’t like coming across as tricky. Because I think my intention is not to frustrate or anger at all, I really feel I’m trying to be communicative, and not be… Maybe even a joke isn’t good either…’ I start to backtrack — Joke wasn’t the right word, but I definitely find that tone is one of the things that makes them so appealing — ‘…Provocative, that is better than joke. I think tricky and jokey imply a kind of knowingness on the part of the artist, a kind of sarcasm, quite mean-spirited. And that’s not at all what I try to do.’ I wondered why a joke (or even a trick) would necessarily seem mean in spirit. It seems generous, playful, a cast member moving behind the scenes to preserve the magic.
She grew up in Brighton and the sound of seagulls instantly reminds her of childhood. ‘I do miss being by the sea, there’s something very nice about there being an end. London will just keep on going, there’ll be the next zone and the next zone. Obviously, it ends at a point, but you would be in Brighton, or Southend. I think the really nice thing about seaside towns is that they have an end.’ The infinity of a horizon. We discuss possible horizon lines in London. There is a great view of the city from a bridge in Archway, but that is where a lot of people kill themselves, she tells me. The city holds a different kind of infinity.
We return to the Zero, Kline & Coma show. ‘All the works were scented with smells I’d created. The smell of a haunted house.’ After experimenting with mixing numerous scented oils, the finished aroma was a combination of leather, smoke and green leaves. An eerie prompt for our most evocative sense. She has also scented prints with bought fragrances claiming to smell like abstract concepts. ‘I did a piece at my degree show that was the smell of Aspiration. Which seemed very fitting.‘ — What does Aspiration smell like? — ‘A bad aftershave. It wasn’t very nice, very artificial. But maybe that’s true. Kind of appropriate. And then, I did another set of prints that were scented with the smell of Enlightenment. In a Buddhist, meditative sense. The prints were cloudy skies, for a significant sense of the world. It was a set of four prints. Two of them were skies over Stonehenge, and two of them were skies over Disneyland.’ A quick spritz, a sparkle, a puff of magic.
‘Sky I (Over Stonehenge)’ (2011), Arrow, screenprint misted with the scent of enlightenment
‘Vexed’ (2012), MDF, hardboard & decorative finish
Which artists does she find inspiring? ‘I think I have a weird relationship with that, because I really try not to idolise artists. I’m not sure if that’s stubbornness. Obviously there are artists who I really love. I tend to read a lot more about people who I find influential to my practice who aren’t necessarily fine artists. At the Slade I wrote my dissertation about counter-culture in America in the Sixties. I found all of those guys really inspirational. There was a group of artists who were originally architects, and they called themselves Ant Farm. Because they were always busy busy working on things and someone commented that they were like an ant farm. They came up with really absurd, wacky, alternative ideas. I find them very inspirational. But yeah, a lot of stuff that is one step away from fine art. And just not wanting to take on board too much from other people. My currency as an artist is my ideas. So it’s really important to me to be aware of context, I want to feel like I have enough ownership over my ideas. Which is ridiculous really, because you can’t help but be influenced constantly by everything.’
As we finish our beers she tells me about a new work she is making, a candelabra in the shape of an arm, inspired by Jean Cocteau’s ‘La Belle et la Bête’ (1946). The bar is growing louder and we are both fading. For the briefest moment I catch her gaze rest on the flickering candles which have been steadily and silently dripping wax onto the table. We part with a fleeting hug but to my later disappointment I don’t recall smelling her. Walking through Shoreditch afterwards the nightlife is a playground. As I pass bars and restaurants with loud music and dim lights, it is like I am walking past the film lots of a studio, through movable scenery, no horizon in sight. I sneak into a very large, loud and dark pizza restaurant to use the facilities. Rather than ‘La Belle et la Bête’, I cannot help but think of the tavern scene of the Disney version. The ceiling is low and the smell of baking bread and melting cheese and the braying of the business men in unbuttoned shirts and the clinking of glasses and the scraping of chairs on the stone flagged floor makes it seem almost perfect, almost real.
All images courtesy of Kitty Clark.