Clare Peake

We live in a highly disposable society. It seems a cliché but there is truth in the sentiment. Detritus of every description has become the only tangible reminder of fleeting connections, gestural memories. Images posted on social media reflect only a memento mori of physical things, significant and not-so-significant events. What happens to the things left behind? Where do we find and re-evoke important happenings and human beings, the relationships of our lives, the fragments of who we used to be?

Clare Peake’s multidisciplinary practice takes form as drawing, sculptural installation, ceramics and repurposing found objects. Peake explores the ways in which knowledge and ideas are accumulated and configured, but by recycling ideas and materials her work aspires to a temporality that is circular, a state of being where the old always becomes new again. Her work provides the viewer with a point of access to consider how to make tangible the structuring and restructuring of an idea, from conceptualisation to articulation. (1)

Peake’s use of the word ‘sorcerer’ in the title of her work A Sorcerer’s Dress (2016–) is a deliberate wordplay on the gendered ideas of transformation and alchemy. Transmutation is critical to Peake’s work, both conceptually and materially. In historical literature, witches had the power to change into other creatures and to heal themselves and others with their knowledge of herbs and benign soothing balms. Seen through the lens of sex-role theory, however, witches have always been viewed with deep suspicion and often killed or cast out because of their knowledge and ability to transform. As women physically age and change roles in relation to the patriarchy, this metamorphic power is seen as threatening and unsettling. (2) On the other hand, alchemists – usually men – were revered as scientists and lauded for their wisdom.

Sorcerers have been understood as magical, mystical and of either sex, often concerned mostly with transmography and the elevation of the spiritual to the divine. The cloak in question – an ongoing work made and remade by the artist – elevates and transforms ordinary and everyday detritus in Peake’s studio into a thing of beauty, a collective revisioning of previous thoughts. It has become the physical manifestation of a diary of sorts (3), recalling new artistic forays and subsequent perceived failures.

Writing in response to this work as a woman, the cloak feels to me like a comfort, a soothing balm to the experiences of being left behind. It provides a hopeful counterpoint that offers ideas about transcendence and recovery, and a sense of agency in this difficult process of salvation. Peake’s Sorcerer’s Dress suggests that we are sorcerers in our lives: with all of our fragilities we do not outgrow our usefulness but merely change and manifest differently to before. Its golden network of haphazardly placed studio remnants connects the viewer to it as a container for stories, reminding us that things can, and will, always change. There is potential and magic in that idea.

Notes

(1)  See Clare Peake, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, retrieved 3 October 2018, http://www.lwgallery.uwa.edu.au/exhibitions/past/here-and-now/artists/clare-peake2.

(2)  Maggie Rosen, ‘A feminist perspective on the history of women as witches’, Dissenting Voices, vol.6, no.1, Spring 2017, pp.21–31.

(3)  Gemma Weston, ‘Purgatory on the Broome Peninsula: the art of Clare Peake’, Garland, retrieved 3 October 2018, https://garlandmag.com/article/clare-peake/.