Than Hussein Clark
Java Nocturne (Above my library-whim!), 2014
Wool, silk, rayon, PVC, tensile, leather, chanler Welsh mountain wool, blackened tulipwood, steel, brass
280 x 210 x 20 cm
At the centre of this sculpture is a woven rug depicting the beam from a torch shining on bat wings, flapping against a dark sky.
Clark’s work ‘queers the canon’ of modernist architecture, decorative arts and theatre, to explore new trajectories of these histories. In this case, Java Nocturne recasts stories of travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989), known for his novel, In Patagonia (1977). Chatwin allegedly started his travelogue about the South American region following a conversation with Eileen Gray at her modernist villa E-1027 on the southern French coast.
Renowned for his storytelling abilities, Chatwin’s writing told ‘not a half-truth but a truth and a half’ (according to Nicholas Shakespeare, who was Chatwin’s biographer). Clark relates this embellishment to Chatwin disguising his bisexuality and being HIV-positive (Matthew McLean, Frieze, 2014). Rather than telling his friends he had AIDS, he claimed to have contracted an extremely rare tropical disease after inhaling bat guano in an Indonesian cave.
The hand-tufted rug is in part woven from wool taken from Chatwin’s sheep, bred at his farm in Wales. Each work in the series 'Java Nocturne' has been given a subtitle taken from Oscar Wilde and is displayed as Eileen Gray might have styled them in her villa. With all these elements coming together Clark mixes design history, mythology and queer experience in a celebration of Chatwin’s self-fictioning.