James Clayden

James is an artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, painting, theatre and film. He lives and works in Melbourne and has had a long friendship with Nonda which dates back to their first collaboration in Fitzroy in the early 80s.

James was commissioned to make a piece for the cellar door room. His brief was simply to capture his impression of Mount Monument. His work is brooding, the density of trees or shadows appear as dark patches but highlighted with seemingly flat but vibrating colour of early morning light and space. Using a very limited palette of house paint, James has captured in his words ‘light and space’ and the broad range of colour and tone that varies so enormously between sunsets, sunrises and the Macedon weather.

He seems to have begun with the physicality of Mount Monument and translated his feelings, impressions into an abstract piece, but there is a fleeting impression of the landscape itself.

This is better described by Adrian Martin for Blockproject 2020 exhibition of James’ work:

“…But what’s important is that his art can incite this game of fleeting projection and recognition. The fleetingness is what matters. The dissolution and rebirth of the trace. The loss of a a stable, consensus referent; but also the finding of a personal point. Just for a moment before it vanishes again. The complex translation that takes the artist down one path, and the spectator along another, around the same work… The eternal mystery of the horizon; is it a thing, existing in itself, or just the interval between other things, land and sky, earth and clouds? The horizon is the line that is not a line; yet what work it can do inside an image.”

As the weather patterns change and evolve in the Macedon Ranges, in part due to climate change, the energy of James’ work reflects on the energies and forces of environmental factors and how fragile the natural world is.

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