Antony Clarkson Artist Statement: The Apophenia Series.

Apophenia: the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas).

My work across painting, sculpture and installation explores the intersections between perception, space, and memory. It is my intention to open new ways of seeing and experiencing the world, offering audiences opportunities to pause, reflect, and reconsider.
The paintings in the Apophenia Series are pure abstraction, drawn from my own experience and memory. They are created to ask the observer to reconsider their preconceived perceptions of the world by providing them with forms that have an uncanny familiarity about them without being anything absolute. They have a form of anthropomorphism, but a distant one being just suggestive enough that they deliberately lead the observer. Some parts may lead in a certain direction whilst others may contradict that idea and propose a different one. Certainly, if one tries to hang too fixed a notion of ‘depiction’ on one of these paintings you are destined to end up confused and lost, like trying to use an Esher image as a blueprint for your home.

My research for this project has led me to some very interesting reading, which has broadened my thinking on the subject into a consideration of how the brain generally makes sense of the messages coming from the eyes and indeed via all of the senses. The latest thinking on these optical processes is that we don't really see every detail of exactly what is in front of us. Indeed, it now appears likely that the brain creates a substantial part of what we see, based on what it expects to see, and only adds extra details, or corrections based on new information from the eyes. Effectively, the brain joins the dots. It makes connections based on a balance of limited information and memory, effectively it uses preconceptions. But what if the image suggested by the conjunction of those dots is fallacious? Then as with my paintings we are into the realms of apophenia.
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Not all that we see is perhaps as straight forward as we think and I hope to give my audience space to consider this through their interaction with my work.