Carissa Farrell | Consolitated Practice | Visual Artists Ireland News Sheet July/August | 2014
In April this year, I took part in an Ask the Artist event at the Luan Gallery, Athlone, with artist Tom Climent. We sat in the gallery with an audience and engaged in conversation about his exhibition, Vessels, and wider his practice as an artist. Following this we corresponded by email for this article.
In the early 1990s Climent had been studying engineering while taking night classes at the Crawford College of Art with the late Jo Allen whose influence encouraged him to go further. In his third year of engineering he left to pursue fine art full time. In the short time I have known Tom (but known his work for many years) I have sensed in him a journeyman approach to being an artist. His description of his own beginnings as an artist tells a story of a man with a primary need to derive meaning from his labour and for his labour to provide the means to exist. This old fashioned Marxist principle doesn’t really fit the traditional notion of achieving success as an artist but Climent’s journeyman work ethic is resolute and unassuming; in his final year of fine art he found a studio outside of college where he continues to work today. He recounts unequivocally ‘I suppose I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do when I graduated. I wanted to have a studio, organise exhibitions and try and get my work known to people’. It’s hardly the fame and fortune sought by many artists – more an achievable path with steps that would provide him with what he needed to feel solid and grounded in his work and life. Climent describes everything about his practice with a considered modesty and openness.
Climent’s graduation show drew attention, and in the years immediately following he gained support from key influential people, such as Very Ryan, who nominated him for the Victor Treacy Award in 1996 and Brian Fallon, adjudicator, who gave Climent the award. In the same year he also won the Tony O’Malley award. Around this time another strong supporter was art dealer Isobel Smith, who sadly passed away in 2010. They were major achievements but when looking back at this now, Climent his hard on himself,
‘I suppose I was lucky as well when I left college…Looking back now I didn’t really appreciate how great these things were to have happened. I suppose I took them for granted, I think in retrospect when you have success early on you assume that this will always happen with your work, of course it doesn’t. The years after this I became complacent I think, I didn’t really make enough of the chances that had been given to me. In hindsight I didn’t really look after my career well enough after achieving that initial success’.
In an earlier email I had asked him to pinpoint key moments in his development/identity as an artist and he very quickly referred to this period negatively. But he also recognised it as being a kind of turning point that propelled him into a new phase. He changed his work both deliberately and radically unfortunately with the result being initial dissatisfaction. However over time he found balance between his old and new practice, and it was at later, around 2003, that things began to really happen for him outside the studio.
In that year he was given the opportunity of a solo show at the Fenton Gallery, now since closed. As a result of its success, it lead to a further shift in his work, Climent describes how:
‘It was a really successful show, all the work sold and it enabled me to move to Spain for a while then the following year…Most of the work I had done previously was large in scale, I hadn’t been able to paint less than 4 feet in size, I’d tried but couldn’t get them to work. Out of practical reasons I started painting small in Spain, I had no separate studio but painted on the roof terrace of where we were staying. These small paintings predominately were abstract in nature but alluded to a space or structure. This has been an overriding theme in my work since then’.
Climent continued to show with the Fenton gallery until its closure, and looks back at his time with the gallery as really positive. He now shows with the Blue Leaf Gallery run by Ciara Gibbons who has brought his work to art fairs in Canada and the US, resulting in representation by the John Cacciola Gallery in New York.
Despite strong support and private representation, it emerged during our conversation at the Luan Gallery that he has felt the impact of the difficult commercial conditions that have prevailed in Ireland over the last five years. I asked him about his dealings with the non-commercial/public sector and other opportunities for funding/income. Initially in the 1990’s Climent sought Arts Council support but was unsuccessful and very diplomatically concedes; ‘( I )I felt that the work I was doing didn’t meet the requirements they were looking for. I was engaging more with commercial galleries and I suppose that was where my work was best placed’. More recently he has had some success, with solo shows in many public spaces, as well as a Cork City Council Bursary for 2014.
A question that always preoccupies me is how an artist maintains their critical perspective while working in isolation. Climent points to discipline as key, the discipline of not becoming complacent or overly self-reliant and the importance of engaging with other artists, curators, gallery owners and collectors so that your view of your work is counterpointed by the views of others. Another method of avoiding isolation is to return to an institution. Climent embarked on a two year Masters in Fine Art in 2009, in the hope of reflecting in a more structured manner, ‘on the ways I had developed of seeing and thinking about my work’. He considers the experience as a contained one, with a start and end, like a repository of research from which he draws continuing influence in his current practice.
To gain insight into his internal process I asked Climent about how he deals with this aspect of his practice. His approach is gentle and seems fragile but is in fact founded in a robust and honest methodology which is deeply felt. He says: ‘I think by nature I’m quite unsure, I found that by being challenged /encouraged helped me develop a means of problem solving in a visual way.There were times at college where I would get quite stuck, the tools I learned there to move beyond a certain limit were probably the most valuable I learned as an artist’.
But for me, Tom Climent describes most eloquently the core of his practice;
‘For me painting is trying to find a balance between being unselfconscious, allowing the work to be formed and also making critical judgements about what work you want to make. It’s a process of doing the work and then reflecting on that work, seeing what has comes out of a period of painting and then deciding on and why certain paintings you feel are more successful than others. These paintings then become almost like signposts in the road ahead. They guide the series of work forward’.
His words illustrate a poetic underpinning in his painting. He uses a critical process that exists on a continuum between narrative and form, emotion and objectivity. It is both felt and conscious and he has relied on it to provide the means by which to ground his commitment to painting. I remember once, in a conversation with Climent’s fellow Cork artist, Maud Cotter, she described how important it is to ‘consolidate’ your practice both conceptually and practically. Climent’s maturity in painting is mirrored in the evolution of his career and perhaps uniquely, has been since before he graduated.