Ferntree Gully artist Pam Clements is building a career with her By Ed Merrison
FERNTREE Gully artist Pam Clements is obsessed with imagination and dreams – so much so she is making a career out of them.
Pam was one of eight emerging Victorian artists who made the final of the Toyota Community Spirit Award, which gave the winner a chance to travel interstate or overseas to develop an artistic project.
She did not win the award, but she is showing related work in an exhibition that opened at the Toyota Gallery in Port Melbourne on Wednesday, 6 September and runs until Wednesday, 22 November.
Pam, who enrolled at RMIT as an art undergraduate 12 years ago and completed her PhD there in 2004, specialises in site-specific installations and works in whatever media her ideas demand.
“I will use painting, sculpture, still and moving images – whatever suits the idea,” she said.
Pam wanted to explore the boundaries between real and imagined experience, present time and memory, in her work in the Toyota exhibition.
She built two low walls, one an “actual” wall of common household bricks and the other its mirror image, a “virtual” wall of cloudy white perspex bricks.
At the same time, two DVDs play.
The first is projected onto a second-floor wall, and shows a wall being constructed in slow motion, with bricks and mortar being added on a dreamy, black and white loop.
The second DVD portrays the building of the wall on a plasma screen, but with colour footage flashing up of people going about their every day business, like fragments of real life.
“The whole work draws a parallel between constructing a wall and constructing a life,” Pam said.
Pam has been interested in exploring time in her art for the past 10 years, and has manipulated images, sound, movement and timing in a number of her installations.
She still dreams of taking this interest to another level by travelling to Europe to use a favourite film, Last Year in Marienbad, as inspiration.
The 1961 French/Italian co-production, hailed as a landmark in artistic cinematography, manipulates the viewer and the perception of the real and imagined.
Pam would like to visit specific buildings in three key locations in the film – Frankfurt, Munich and the Czech spa town of Marienbad – to take notes and shoot new footage.
“My intention is to explore the associations in literature and philosophy that connect the film to the buildings,” she said. “It would be wonderful to research it through those countries and bring it together as a body of work.”
Pam’s vision and scope may seem incredible to those of us with more banal preoccupations, but for her it is natural.
“It’s just the way I live my life. It’s what keeps me sane,” she said. “I suppose it’s just making sense of what’s around you.”
