Asiya Clarke’s work examines the relationship between the parts and the whole. Starting with images of water, she playfully imagines the beginnings of creation, the emergence of the particular from a great undifferentiated mass finding patterns and structures that are both universal and ephemeral. She investigates how an image grabs our attention, how all symmetry, such as the doubling in a reflection or a Rorschach blot, seems to relate to the body and particularly the face, figuration appearing within abstraction, presenting a private gateway to a parallel reality.
Pareidolia, the title for her latest body of work, is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus being perceived as significant, in other words finding meanings in arbitrary or chance data. Predominantly abstract, the work hints at figuration and therefore has an element of surrealism. How little it takes to evoke a face, even one circle becomes an eye, so compelling is the urge to find meaning in the apparently random.
Her life and work are informed by Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, that requires a temporary loss of ego, allowing an immersion in the universal. She is preoccupied with self transcendence and the desire to “gaze upon mystery”.
Pareidolia, the title for her latest body of work, is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus being perceived as significant, in other words finding meanings in arbitrary or chance data. Predominantly abstract, the work hints at figuration and therefore has an element of surrealism. How little it takes to evoke a face, even one circle becomes an eye, so compelling is the urge to find meaning in the apparently random.
Her life and work are informed by Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, that requires a temporary loss of ego, allowing an immersion in the universal. She is preoccupied with self transcendence and the desire to “gaze upon mystery”.