G2-15 Floating Ideas

Brian Clarke’s stained glass folding screen Floating Ideas displays 37 pages of the artist’s favourite poems scattered across four panels. Floating Ideas was inspired by a chance happening while Clarke was in Spain. As he recalled in 2019:

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Brian Clarke’s stained glass folding screen Floating Ideas displays 37 pages of the artist’s favourite poems scattered across four panels. Floating Ideas was inspired by a chance happening while Clarke was in Spain. As he recalled in 2019:

‘I was in Seville, and I had a poetry book and I left it out in the sun. And the sun burnt the glue on the spine, and the wind blew the pages into the pool, and it looked beautiful. It just looked beautiful. So it was like it wasn’t my idea really: it was God’s – I just copied him. I have a book of poetry called the Oxford Book of English Poems, I think it was edited by John Hayward, and I bought it when I was at Burnley Art School. Or I might have nicked it from the bookshop down me pants, I used to do that. And it’s been with me ever since I was a teenager, and all the pages in that screen I insisted were from that book, they had to be absolutely copied from it.’

On the occasion of the 2018 exhibition Brian Clarke: Art of Light at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Clarke produced Floating Ideas as a stained glass screen in six panels. Floating Ideas exists in an edition of 10 unique variants plus 3 artist's proofs, published by HENI. This artwork was produced with a technique devoid of lead cames, allowing it to freely interact with its surroundings.

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