Hikalu Clarke’s recent debut solo show Dredge at Sumer in Tauranga, New Zealand was a knockout. The exhibition featured new sewn fabric works on stretchers which read as paintings. Constructed over the last two years during successive lockdowns in Aotearoa in the artist’s inner city apartment – which overlooks a section of Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland’s elevated motorways where three major arterial roads converge – the works evoke an aerial view of these labyrinthine motorways and their iconic depictions by painter Robert Ellis.
Clarke’s instinctive, improvised, process-based making is an alternative to the artist’s usual conceptually-driven methodology. Clarke sees the works as akin to drawings. He describes: “utilising the existing languages within the fabric (source, materiality, patina, existing marks and stains, etc.) as a means of finding points to highlight, crop, and shift towards and away… They’re produced flat and then are stretched — through this process seams rip and fabrics tear — it becomes a point where I can further intercede, deciding whether I re-stretch or utilise the marks produced and make them permanent through hand-stitching.”
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