Platform A Gallery

Artist Spotlight: James Clarkson

Clarkson’s work explores contemporary office work as a condition that shapes everyday life. Working with sculpture and photography, he draws on his own personal experience of cognitive labour to examine how work structures time, attention and how its logics extend beyond the workplace. Clarkson’s new sculptural work takes the form of an abstracted desktop, discarded and left behind. It’s surface slowly gathers fallen leaves, as if deposited over time. The sculpture considers redundancy as both a material and conceptual condition, holding a moment in which work has ceased but its structure remains. Referencing drought-induced leaf abscission, or “false autumn”, an untimely, stress response rather than a seasonal inevitability; the work draws a parallel with institutions once thought stable, now caught in repeated cycles of restructure. As economic conditions tighten, roles and resources are shed; human labour, like the leaf, becomes expendable, cast off to sustain the system despite being one of its most vital parts.

Currently on view at Platform A in RELAY [02].

Open Tuesdays- Fridays.
10am - 4pm

Images:
1- Sleeper, 2026, James Clarkson
2-False Autumn, 2026, James Clarkson
3- (Detail) False Autumn, 2026, James Clarkson
4- (Detail) False Autumn, 2026, James Clarkson

(Photography by James Clarkson)

Details from RELAY [02]

Currently on display at Platform A.
Open Tuesday - Friday
10am - 4pm

Images:
1-Holds, 2026, Thomas Griffiths (Detail)
2- Designing Against Vandalism, 2026, Simona Brinkmann (Detail)
3- Field (Series), 2026, Thomas Griffiths (Detail)
4- Just Passing (2022), 2022, Charlotte Dawson (Detail)
5- Just Passing II (2026), 2026, Charlotte Dawson (Detail)
6- False Autumn, 2026, James Clarkson (Detail)

(Photography by James Clarkson)