David Clarke: An Alchemist of Unholy Alliances
David Clarke has gained a reputation as the 'bad boy' of British silversmithing, carving a distinct route through the world of contemporary craft. For Goldsmiths’ Stories, writer Rolf Hughes reports on this contemporary alchemist, who rejoices in unlikely connections.
“It will be apparent that it is difficult to discern which properties each thing possesses in reality.”
Caddisfly larvae, known for their intricate case-building, offer a powerful metaphor for adaptation and transformation in a changing world. Traditionally, these larvae construct protective homes using natural materials like sand grains and silk, carefully selecting each element from their environment. As their habitats have evolved, so too have their methods, incorporating new and unexpected materials like microplastics into their creations. This shift highlights their remarkable resilience, turning debris into eye-catching wearables. In this opportunistic stage of growth, the larvae demonstrate an acute awareness of their surroundings, weaving together elements in new juxtapositions—not unlike an artist crafting a unique narrative from the world they inhabit. This delicate balance between necessity and creativity reflects a larger process of transformation, making the caddisfly larvae a master of material artistry.
Since the Royal College of Art released David Clarke in 1997, he has gained a reputation as the 'bad boy' of British silversmithing, carving a distinct route through the world of contemporary craft, subverting norms of beauty and value, bending the constraints of material, function, and form to his will, upsetting sacred verities along the way. A contemporary alchemist, rejoicing in unlikely connections, he has created an art of ambiguity in which metal serves as a site of conflict, vulnerability, transformation. Each piece interrogates matter irrespective of status (polished, precious, unfinished, outcast, prized heirloom, busted scrap). Eerily familiar yet unsettling, often brazenly sporting the scars of working marks, Clarke's art suggests unholy alliances between the suction of tradition and the desire to escape from its vortex drag.
The alchemist undergoes a journey of transformation of meaning (the transformation of symbol), the nature of matter (transformed by experiment through apparatuses today associated with modern chemistry such as the crucible, the mortar and the pestle), and, crucially, the self. This journey is therefore personal. Unlike the scientist who holds her experiments at a distance and claims thereby to maintain an objective relationship to her work, the alchemist is their work. Clarke's journey as an artist and silversmith is a tale of refining a practice through trial and discovery, involving a constant balancing of instinct, discipline, and innovation. Learning to move on, even from successful projects like Blow Spoons (2017), became a way of embracing the power of restraint, leaving space for untapped creative possibilities. In his workshop, Clarke’s practice evolved into something as intuitive and familiar as preparing a meal. The parallels between cooking and metalwork—cutting, baking, filing, firing—blurred, as both spaces became sites of artistry and connection, whether he was sharing a meal or presenting at an exhibition.
His work transcends the purely material, being a medium for social and cultural commentary. Projects like Dead on Arrival (2012), Another Crossing (2020) or Family Matter (2020) allowed Clarke to critically engage with complex narratives, spanning mortality, political history, family dynamics. Through decades of working abroad, Clarke found distance from the workshop essential to rejuvenating his creative vision. He also credits his early years at the Marks & Spencer supermarket for teaching him invaluable lessons in communication and customer service—skills that translated seamlessly into managing his own creative practice. Rejection was a constant companion, but Clarke's resilience became his most reliable tool. From seven university rejections to repeated setbacks in prestigious competitions, he learned that perseverance is just as crucial as talent. His subsequent embrace of social media enabled him to reach a new, younger, more diverse audience and reshaped his relation to art, craft and design. He shares his work online generously, and as soon as the splenetic trolling of Anon (Guardian of the Silversmith Canon) arrived, Clarke published it—creating a stimulus to debate, an opportunity for learning both for himself and his community.
The alchemist/artist's work is not limited to the transformation of symbols or materials, nor is it limited to the transformation of the adept—the solitary individual. Rather Clarke's work reveals what can be characterised as an ecology of practices. By stitching multiple stories or characters into his work—through the re-purposing of found artefacts like the teapot in Hullabaloo (2024), for example—he invokes an environment wider than personal apprenticeship, competence and expertise. These objects are haunted by the past histories from which they have been severed.
Clarke's uncompromising interventions expose and mock that performative world of British class, featuring genteel interactions mediated by silverware of defined value and purpose, with inequality and cruelty quietly humming beneath the gentle tinkle of spoon on saucer. As he writes about Oohlala (2008), another ex-teapot, "I was told by traditionalists that 'you’re not a real silversmith until you have made a teapot.' My response was to take an unwanted antique, chop it up and stuff it with lead. Shifting it from recognisably traditional and functional to dysfunctional and highly poisonous." This is an interaction between the personal (the adept's journey), the symbolic (the attributed, conventional meaning of the artefact), the material (what the piece was made of versus what it is now made of, rendering it unusable for its original function), and the environmental (the opportunism we saw demonstrated by caddisfly larvae and that is also part of the alchemist's learning i.e. the discoveries made along the journey).
Material transformation for the alchemist is a means towards a deeper understanding of matter—the value and potential concealed in the seemingly mundane. Clarke’s willingness to experiment with materials, to expose them to chance, play and risk, mirrors the alchemist’s experimental attitude when subjecting substances to extreme conditions to unlock their hidden properties. In Clarke's work we see traces of both brutal and tender encounters. His workshop is an alchemical laboratory where force, pressure, and patience are deployed to bring wax, ceramics, manufactured products and industrial scrap, broken leftovers and collectibles into proximity with metals—from the precious (gold and silver) to base (lead, zinc, copper), pewter, galena and graphite, all transmuted through Clarke's craft into works of unique value. Spell-making occurs through methods such as insalting (where silver is baked in a salt crust) or bonbonieres where sugar crystals are grown for six months through sugar hearts. By leaving traces of his making visible, Clarke documents and displays the experiment; the marks bear witness to the transformation they have helped bring about. Indeed, turning the base elements of the world into objects of wonder and transcendence may be considered a political—even revolutionary—act, challenging us to see beyond the surface of the quotidian and, like Lucretius, acknowledge the transformative power within all things.
Alongside fruitful collaborations with other artists such as Tracey Rowledge, curators such as Glenn Adamson, or institutions such as the Fuller Craft Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, or the National Taiwan Craft Research Institute’s Stone Department, Clarke's practice involves "being disrespectful and willing different disciplines to collide," as he states in relation to "blowing up ceramics" as part of his process in creating "Brainfart" (Clarke's deadpan titles are artworks in themselves). His work addresses audiences beyond those of craft connoisseurship. It has attitude. It rescues artefacts from rituals so entrenched as to seemingly petrify matter itself. Domestic utensils such as tableware are melded, warped and imbued with unpredictability, disobedience. Solder joins are exposed, allowing seams to pucker, embracing the chance operations of material reactions (chance being a force that Clarke respects and incorporates rather than controls). His pieces often seem to teeter on the brink of chaos, balancing precariously, as if they could collapse or mutate at any moment. This disequilibrium creates a feeling that the object is still in a state of becoming, imbued with a sensual, tactile quality, yet still incomplete, lacking a coherent context or history. It is an eloquent response to the multiple dislocations of urban, industrial society. As time leaves its striations on the material world, Walter Benjamin's elegiac wonder at the dulled detritus of modern life seems as relevant as ever.
Clarke’s embrace of the unwanted, the misfit, the overlooked, the element that doesn’t quite belong draws on a humanitarian impulse to find beauty in things that do not fit into categories. He has created an oeuvre populated by dimly-recovered experiences, silent encounters, mute witnesses, exposed scars. His works seem accessible and collectable, but this may be part of their sly ontology; innocently, we invite them into our spaces whereupon they claim their obligation to disturb us for our remaining days. Ultimately, the work of the enfant terrible of British silversmithing invites us to see the world and its materials in new ways—accepting the resilience of imperfection, celebrating the grace of mischief.
Written by Rolf Hughes for Goldsmiths’ Stories. Rolf Hughes is Director of Education for EIT Culture & Creativity. He has been Vice-President of the Society for Artistic Research and served as expert advisor on artistic research to national research councils in Sweden, Norway, Portugal, and Austria. The thoughts expressed in this article are his own and not an expression of his professional function(s).
Feature photography by Paul Read for The Goldsmiths’ Company.
Photographs of Dead on Arrival, Hullabaloo, and Brainfart courtesy of David Clarke.
David Clarke and fellow metalsmith Adi Toch have created Lost & Found, a physical and intellectual intervention at Goldsmiths’ Hall exclusively for Goldsmiths' Fair 2024.
You can experience their intervention from 24-29 September and 1-6 October 2024, and join David Clarke, Adi Toch, and Annie Warburton FCGI FRSA, writer, presenter and CEO/Clerk of the Goldsmiths’ Company, for a conversation that interrogates and explores Lost & Found on Wednesday 25 September from 9:30-10:30am.