Artist and photographer based in Sheffield, UK.

Clarkson’s practice explores contemporary office work as a condition that shapes everyday life. Working with sculpture and photography, he draws on his own experience of office work to examine how repetition, pressure, and constant responsiveness are absorbed over time, shaping behaviour, relationships and workers’ sense of agency.

Responding to the aesthetics of digital and physical office environments, he is interested in the coded and often impersonal language of administration and how its specificity across different organisations can produce distance between individuals operating within shared systems. He focuses on the shared experiences of alienation that emerge from these conditions, as well as moments where the economic structures that sustain them begin to break down, producing conditions of redundancy.

Formally, this is articulated through sculptural arrangements that draw on the visual language of administration, including arrows, data flows and fragments of coded text. These are combined with materials and forms associated with office space; cardboard, filing systems and computer equipment, arranged across abstracted desk structures. At times dispersed and at others contained, these elements shift between states of sprawl and order, emphasising processes of accumulation, organisation and control.

Selected solo exhibitions include; K-House, Bloc Projects, Sheffield (2021); Smooth Flow, The Tetley, Leeds (2014); Pavilion, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow (2012); Twin Tone Lustre, DREI, Cologne (2013); A Painted Sun as a Yellow Spot, Rod Barton Gallery, London (2012)

Selected group exhibitions include; Private Song, Doosan Arts Centre, Seoul (2020); The Coventry Biennial, Coventry (2019); The Collection Stripped Bare, The Lab’Bel Collection, Paris (2016); Return Journey, Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno (2014); About Sculpture, Rolando Anselmi, Berlin (2014); Graphic Design, Futura Project, Prague (2014)

James Clarkson was the recipient of the 2019-2021 Freelands Foundation Artist Platform, in partnership with Site Gallery, and received the 2020 Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award. He was also a participant of Syllabus VI, which is an independent alternative art school organised by Wysing Arts Centre, Eastside Projects, Iniva Arts, Spike Island and Studio Voltaire.

For all enquiries please contact: j.k.l.clarkson@gmail.com