Early Modern
Clara Weale makes Early Modern by hand in Glasgow, in batches small enough to count. The approach is playful. The working question is what a material actually is, and whether that can be the whole subject instead of something buried under prettier language. Nothing gets dressed up to seem more expensive than it is, and each release keeps getting cut back until only the essential gesture remains.
The work stays close to its own ingredients. The materials run to crushed concrete, dusty pages, an extinguished candle, lettuce under glasshouse glass. Ordinary rooms and ordinary British weather get rebuilt out of things nobody expects to find in a bottle. What Clara Weale is after is recognition without a source, the sense of having smelled something before without being able to say where.
