Jennifer Clarke
Jennifer Clarke is an artist, anthropologist, researcher, and educator who currently works as a Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Gray’s School of Art. “My research, teaching and artistic practice combine and explore the borders of art and anthropology, in practice as well as theory. My background is in the arts and humanities, I have a Ph.D. in Anthropology, on and with art and ecology. Broadly, I have been engaged with ecology, and ecological thinking: My PhD was about art and forestry in Scotland, drew on feminist philosophy and emerged in collaboration with women artists as well as through creative and participatory practices; my transdisciplinary post-doctoral fellowship developed through a series of residencies and exhibitions in Japan and Scotland exploring the role of art post disaster. My work brings continental and feminist cultural theory together with anthropology and contemporary art practice. I work in the interstices – the interstices of thinking-feeling, of bodies, human, nonhuman, entangling with places and other communities. Doing this for me means asking questions about what it means to make things, what it means to co-compose with the world? (cf. Manning, 2014).
My most recent work has engaged themes of parenthood, interdependence, shared bodies and material intimacy through the aesthetic forms of layering, appropriation, polyphony and autobiography, as well as socially engaged practices, considering bodies’ (human and nonhuman) capacities for perception and affection. I take an explicitly feminist approach making work that responds to social and ecological issues: taking part in residencies, collaborative filmmaking, exhibiting visual work, making installations and participating in performances and events of various kinds. I also curate programmes in the interstices of academia and art, what might be called trans-pedagogical events and workshops, as well as publishing academic and creative writing. I am Co-Convenor of a European network called ANTART – Anthropology and the Arts – and am currently the Chair of the board of the Scottish Sculpture workshop. A current project called “Voicing Care”, extends my work in “post disaster” Japan. Having written about experiences of ‘enduring’ disaster and practices of consolation post-disaster Japan, I am interested in practices of care that ‘take time’, in forms of material and social ‘repair’ work.”
