Harry Clinch is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in painting, sculpture, and video. A Central Saint Martins graduate, he received the Kate Barton Award for Painting in 2021. His work translates complex ways of thinking and seeing into tangible objects, images, and sounds, drawing from a rich web of myths, symbols, and philosophies. Clinch likens his creative process to cooking, using recipes and ingredients to inform his art.
He distills painting into playful, primitive forms, viewing mark making as a record of physical action. Clinch combines old and new materials, observing their interactions and documenting their interactions. His practice involves deconstructing and recombining graphemes into new symbols, imagining their sounds.
Clinch's method explores the transformation of ideas across disciplines, feeding outputs from one process into another. He begins with recipes that evolve through various stages—photographing, printing, scanning, and remixing. He arranges images and objects in multidimensional spaces, refining his work in a process of permutation and iteration.
Using a variety of paints, pigments, inks and binders, Clinch creates gestural marks, experimenting with the materiality of his tools and body movements. He considers white space, cross-pollination, and the dynamics of light and dark, matte and gloss. His work emphasizes the interplay of configurations and sequences, drawing inspiration from comic strips and contact sheets.