Research/ Artworks
Since 2020 Judith Clark has changed her studio practice, informed by not only the mounting crisis around sustainable exhibition-making but also by the need to create new conceptual frameworks for presenting practice-based research.
In 2023 she created a re-usable, mobile tripartite structure in her studio space with which to stage ‘essay’ exhibitions.
She stated ‘most exhibitions have one good idea that is then drawn out across a large space; details are repeated, and a lot of material is wasted. It is often possible to concentrate an exhibition idea into the three structures: 1. ‘Reference (a book case of key texts/imagery); 2. Site/Concept (a scale model of the exhibition site mapped onto a scale model of JC studio at 1:12 for readability in situ) and 3. A design detail 1:1, or one styled mannequin, exquisitely crafted – an element that is usually unaffordable for exhibition budgets to apply to a larger surface area or multiples.’
In 2024 Clark is launching her series “Research Souvenirs” – artworks that come from the exhibition research.
The Judgement of Paris
‘The Judgement of Paris’ is a project that Clark started in 2010 and has no foreseeable end*. It uses a familiar story (and Paris as a provocative pun), to look at the practice of fashion exhibition-making. Looking at and exhibiting the same story – about the drama of selection and of competing values -over and over again scrutinises curatorial practice.
It came primarily out of two sources, Hubert Damisch’s Le Jugement de Pâris: Iconologie analytique, 1992, and Anna Piaggi’s Doppie Pagine in 1994, Moda-logia Mitologia in Italian Vogue. Close reading of sources on the one hand, irreverence on the other, with a shared preoccupation about both persistence and transformation – and about the ideals in play.
Hypothetical souvenirs have been made for Clark’s ongoing Judgement of Paris research: Judgement of Paris II (a series of nails based on Manuel Deutsch’s monograph in the Warburg Library); and Judgement of Paris VIII (‘the River Gods’, bottom section removed from the large panel from the Judgement of Paris at the Palazzo Altemps Museum in Rome in 1901’)
(Research Souvenirs will be exhibited in Judith Clark’s first Solo Show in Perth, Western Australia in 2027)
Notes:
Judgement of Paris IV, 2019 (Lanvin, 130 Years, after Georges Lepape 1924)
Judgement of Paris V, 2020 (Archivist Addendum, the Goddesses in the Lanvin Archive)
Judgement of Paris VI , 2020(A letter to Federico Pepe, a hypothetical typographic exhibition after Damisch)
Judgement of Paris VII , 2020-23 (The Amden Atelier model and film, with Roman Kurzmeyer and Sam Little)
Judgement of Paris VIII, 2023 (After Algardi, Palazzo Altemps, Rome)