Sonya Clark
FORM FOLLOWS FUSION
Born in Washington, DC
Works in Richmond, Virginia
The comb is an ancient object loaded with meaning and intimately connected to human history. Striking a careful balance between exploiting its formal attributes and recognizing its significance to culture and identity, Sonya Clark’s work helps us to see the comb in a new way, plumbing her interest in hairstyling and its accoutrements as expressions of cultural heritage, racial identity, gender politics and multiple definitions of beauty.
Clark’s personal connection to the comb began like that of nearly every young girl, squirming on a chair while an adult armed with a comb and good intentions attempted to bring order to the disorder on her head. In the pieces chosen for Manuf®actured – Stacked, 7-Layer Tangle, and her Untitled wall piece – she has confronted the fine toothed combs of her childhood and made them her raw material, embracing what had once been an adversarial relationship. Employing hundreds of mass-produced black fine toothed combs, Clark explored the myriad ways in which combs could fit together to create a wide variety of sculptural forms.
Linking this unconventional raw material to her past artistic production and self-definition as a textile artist led Clark to develop a series of wall installations, further pushing the two-dimensional properties of the comb. The result is a series of pieces that function aesthetically and psychologically as textiles. Here, each comb's set of teeth performs the conceptual role of the warp and weft of the woven textile. By consciously choosing a manufactured plastic comb as her “fiber,” she shakes the very notions of what a textile can be.
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
Sonya Clark, 7-Layer Tangle, 2005
Plastic combs;
Collection of the artist
Sonya Clark, Stacked, 2005
Plastic combs;
Collection of the artist
Sonya Clark, Untitled (threadwrapped blue and brown), 2008
Plastic combs, thread;
Collection of the artist
