Garden of Eden - artist talk + Q&A with Clinton Kirkpatrick

Clinton Kirkpatrick's exhibition can be viewed between 10am and 6pm during the week of Imagine! Festival in 2 Royal Avenue.

Join us for this artist talk and Q&A with Clinton Kirkpatrick about his exhibition of works titled ‘Garden of Eden’. This is a familiar concept; a religious story used to promote notions of beauty, wholeness and connection to the Divine, patriarchy, disobedience, and the introduction of sin and mortality.

During the Covid-19 pandemic the artist reevaluated, started a process, and became approved as a foster carer in May 2021. Five years working as a foster parent has brought a lot of joy and challenges. Clinton is interested in how fostering has influenced his art practice and how he can use the Arts to help support the children. In the artist's practice he has subsequently made work examining opposing spaces of chaos and calm, and topics relating to homophobia.

Clinton’s artistic practice observes the absurd, the autobiographical, and systems such as religious, political or communal. Garden of Eden brings together beauty and destruction and we invite you into this world.

In 2023 Clinton presented an exhibition, A Mental Illness on Canvas, at QSS Gallery, Belfast, that contained collage work titled ‘Life on Earth' and ‘Life in Space’, as well as ink drawings discussing homophobic language. With reflection, work was created as a subconscious manifestation of a fostering experience. Life on Earth appeared chaotic and destructive whereas Life in Space appeared calm, serene and playful. Initially artworks emerged as a subconscious experience of an inner space. Garden of Eden seeks to purposefully combine the subconscious and visible world, amalgamating it and making it tangible. We all live in a world that is beautiful yet peppered with uncertainty.

Often the artist felt as though they were living within two distinct spaces, either entirely frenzied or calm, and there didn’t seem to be a middleground. There was a force attached to both and the artist used collage as a way to represent this by ripping, cutting, and layering work. Noise can be heard on Earth yet in space it is completely silent. As a foster parent you are, often, dealing with trauma and the vast networks surrounding the youth. There is a lot of external noise. Sometimes these networks present a lot more problems. As well as dealing with issues surrounding the youth and others you are, incidentally, dealing with your own behaviours, too. All of us are dealing with what it means to be fundamentally human, which is what Clinton’s practice seeks to understand.

We are currently living in a world where opposing ideas collide in ways unprecedented. How do we comfortably have a voice in a world dominated by greed, hatred, homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, or polarisation?

Humour and the absurd underpins Clinton’s practice. For the artist it has always been a way to reflect the world back to itself whilst simultaneously dissecting it. He thinks that the world we live in is often absurd, cruel and disjointed, yet beautiful, joyous and extraordinary, and the artist has a freedom, through his practice, to explore and poke fun at these notions.

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Host or Publisher Imagine! Belfast Festival of Ideas & Politics