Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/488332
7 Prunella Clough's paintings are, broadly speaking, concerned with objects and places. Her favoured sites included factories and industrial sites; indeterminate landscapes such as slag heaps and gravel pits and, in later life, a street market and a cemetery. In many respects she might be described as predominantly a still-life painter; still-life was an ever-present model for her, a 'culture of artefacts', that explores 'what "importance" tramples underfoot'. 1 It has been suggested that because the conventional subject matter of still-life – flowers, mundane household object – is o en considered inconsequential and is therefore 'overlooked', it restores prominence to objects that are routinely bypassed on the grounds that they are inherently uninteresting. 2 They are, of course, the objects that surround us daily, those to which Frances Spalding refers when she emphasises 'Clough's liking for the abject, things forlorn and overlooked'. 3 Clough's subject matter was to be found 'in the detailed, the dilapidated, the exceptional and the laws of their transformation'. 4 In practical terms (which should not be overlooked), still-life was well-adjusted to the years of extreme austerity that followed the Second World War: its subject matter was cheap and readily available; it demanded no travelling, no models and only small quantities of paint and canvas. Its presence emerges in works as different as the small Still Life with Yellow Marrows, 1948, made at the start of Clough's career and Fancy Goods, 2, 1992, a mature reverie on the colourful, cheap plastic toys and kitchenware abundantly displayed in North End Road market in Fulham. Though she presented Marrows as a conventional still-life, arranged on a table-top, she rapidly extended the genre as she devoted herself to aspects of daily life that are habitually ignored by most artists. Early in her career Clough made a habit of visiting factories, o en with her friend, the sculptor Ghisha Koenig. Both artists were fascinated by the interface between people and machinery and the balance of dominance between them; by mechanical details and the dull colours of industrial buildings in and around post-war London. Clough, like Koenig, was working within the emerging genre of post-war Realism, vigorously promoted by her friend the critic and painter, John Berger. Their fascination with industrial subjects also, of course, situated them within the crisis of early post-war Britain when an economy all but destroyed by war debt had to be reconstructed through its industrial base. Clough's paintings of fishermen, lorry drivers, printers, electricians and biscuit makers, among others, reveal figures who are deeply anonymous yet not alien: they are alternative versions of ourselves. Manhole II, 1952 demonstrates the way that she understood and presented workers as subsumed into their activities: the hole in the ground forms an ellipse precisely echoed by the head and shoulders (a second ellipse) of the man peering into it. Her protagonists were usually men, though women appear occasionally and prominently inhabit the canvases relating to the Peak Frean biscuit factory. Focussing on artisans at work, presenting them as people engaged in structured activities in specific locations, Clough accorded them little or no reality beyond their labour and its setting. This certainly had less to do with hard-line socialism (though she had little sympathy for the conventional politics of her class) than with her visual obsessions. The figure in Woman by Ventilator, 1954 stands in front of wall fittings that involve a light and an alarm bell set behind a grille; her counterpart, Woman Minding Machine, 1953 operates a large precision tool. She is a pale, reticent presence alongside her machine and the prominent wall attachments behind her. It seems that in both cases Clough was Prunella Clough: Subject and Object Margaret Garlake Left: Still Life with Yellow Marrows, 1948 (page 20) Right: Manhole II, 1952, (page 29)