Sleeper
Words by Alexander Harding
Days blur into indistinguishable copies, tasks repeat, agency dissolves. Over time, the tedium of work can stretch into an inescapable, unyielding rhythm, bending every other aspect of life to its will; so much so, that any disruption to this treadmill feels seismic. Just as you close your eyes, the thought of it lingers.
It’s within this condition that James Clarkson’s ‘Sleeper’ exists – it’s a record of many subtle insurgencies. Stolen moments of autonomy amid the oppressive uniformity of day-to-day labour. The photographs in ‘Sleeper’ feature a spectral figure caught mid-task, drained, burnt out. Ground down by the relentlessness of work. Lost in the drab labyrinth of the office, the figure has snatched a fleeting moment for themself, illuminated only by the mechanical sweep of the scanner’s sensor. Sheets of crisp A3 spill indifferently from the machine’s mouth, as if production continues, regardless of the figure's presence.
Clarkson created ‘Sleeper’ amid redundancy consultations during his administrative day job, where he regularly appropriated the office scanner, an emblem of capitalist efficiency, and transformed it into a tool of resistance and creative disruption. The resulting suite of images reclaim moments of artistic expression from the monotony of routine, portraying a working body suspended between his contractual obligation and a drive toward self-expression.
Performing directly into the scanner, by lying across its glass plate, Clarkson allows the machine's rigid mechanics to impart texture onto the images. The uniformity of the device, its ghostly elongated exposures, monochrome aesthetics, and the deliberate placement of objects and the body across the apparatus are all relational elements that evoke photographic history; particularly perennial experiments in cameraless photography. Clarkson’s approach acts as a continuation of those exploratory forms of media, returning to a manipulation of space and time to produce physical impressions of impermanence.
His images materialise that point wherein the thought of work seeps into your dreams. Such intrusions are not merely metaphorical but an unsettling reality of modern existence. The theorist Jonathan Crary describes this aptly as the ‘erosion of sleep under capitalism’, foreseeing that boundaries between work and rest are being dissolved, as we are collectively sacrificing sleep in the name of ever higher levels of productivity. Sleep is increasingly a space left only to recharge the mind ready for the next day of labour, rather than a space where the mind is free to discover, picture, and process experiences. Our increasingly prosthetic relationship with technology, coupled with the expectation to always be online, deepens this unrelenting turn.
Across the images in this book, Clarkson’s hands sometimes embrace mundane office ephemera – plastic folders, packaging, elastic bands – objects that, like the present body, are stripped of their function and absorbed into the composition in a dissonant fusion. Choice pictures also incorporate elements from his previous sculptural works, dissolving distinctions between artistic production and administrative work, foregrounding how both are manipulated via established systems of agency. Clarkson’s action of reintroducing features of his past artworks into these new compositions suggests an ongoing emotional tension between artistic ambition and economic survival that threads through his practice; a confrontation between personal dreams and the structures that dictate their viability. The images of ‘Sleeper’ adsorb and embody this tension, capturing fleeting moments where personal and professional identities collapse into one another. The figure across the series is both an artist and a worker, subject to the same alienation, precarity, and exploitation that define life under capitalism.
In this sense, the photographs emphasise the peculiar paradox of creative labour: in how the pursuit of artistic fulfilment is often inextricable from the economic realities that constrain it. They question whether the dream of artistic freedom is a genuine possibility or just another iteration of the broader capitalist dream, a reality that often remains out of reach, particularly in a society that seldom compensates artists fairly, if at all. Clarkson lingers in this uncertainty, revealing not just the exhaustion of employment but the quiet defiance of those who continue to create within, and despite, the prescribed structures that seek to contain them.