Simon Clark

Bachelor of Fine Arts (Drawing & Printmaking)

My work aims to explore how Brutalist architecture represented more than just an interesting aesthetic but in fact, underpinned a naïvely optimistic belief that the future would be socialist and utopian.

The use of collage is intended to bring non-illusionistic materiality to the subject; and yet, as constructed images, the collaged elements intentionally play with representational recognisability—the simplified colours and forms flex the pictorial divisions of interpretation and index. The aim is to suggest an alternate reality, a parallel dimension where the utopian dream was made real, somehow almost visible in the periphery of our vision yet just out of reach, like a series of lost futures.

In photographing extant Brutalist structures, I aim to illustrate just how out of place they seem in the twenty-first century as living relics embodying an idealism that is also out of place; the ghost of a utopian vision that never came to pass.