Lamina

Lamina is a monumental stained glass artwork created in 2005. First exhibited as an installation in London's Gagosian Gallery in 2005, it is recognised as a landmark in the history of stained glass.

Screenprinted on a gigantic scale, Lamina abstracts Clarke’s own photos. Clarke utilises an industrial solution to produce this effect: Ben Day dots, a technique from paper printing. Its designs stemmed from those for an unrealised new grandstand at Royal Ascot in 2005, employing outsized oak and sycamore foliage on a grand scale.

At Gagosian Gallery, this wall of glass continued through the clear glass of the gallery window onto the street. In his essay ‘Layers of Meaning’ for the Gagosian exhibition catalogue, Martin Harrison writes:

‘Here he extended the implications of the sinuous physical curving of his earlier Glass Wall by penetrating the outer (clear glass) skin of the art gallery and pushing through onto the street, literally as well as metaphorically dismantling walls and boundaries and engaging spectators inside and outside the gallery, under artificial as well as natural illumination. To have eradicated the conventional vertical 'field' of fenestration is arguably his most radical move yet, and one whose development could have significant repercussions for stained glass. The 'abstract' (and, for many critics at the time, provocative) calligraphic interventions onto the surface of the glass in his early designs were envisaged as acting on a single, flat plane; by contrast, Lamina is engineered to tilt out of the perpendicular axis: the spectator is drawn into the space-without-walls, becoming a participant and a kinetic element in the event.’