Clift recently completed a year’s fellowship in France as part of being awarded the 2022 Prix Henry Clews by the La Napoule Art Foundation. This prestigious prize provides an accomplished sculptor with studio space and resources for a year’s residency and a summer exhibition at the Château de La Napoule in France.
Artist Statement
I’ve spent the last twenty years focusing on a small number of themes and ideas, allowing them to evolve deeply in my practice over time. These include the play between gravity, balance and equilibrium, the suggestion of gesture and movement in static forms, and the interaction of vulnerability, resilience, and the tension that arises between them.
My sculptures are abstract but evocative, tied to familiar forms. They explore the line between order and disorder, combining intersecting parts into a whole that stands in delicate equilibrium on a small foot. Each work is precarious, yet ultimately poised and stable, overcoming entropy. I use this narrow point of balance to connect viewers to something beyond the sculptural object itself. In each form are tension and poise, the suggestion of gesture or movement, the ephemeral moment between breathing in and out.
My training is a combination of engineering, the sciences, and the arts, and with my sculpture I aim to pull these disparate fields together. As I would have said in my days as an engineer, the point of balance is where potential energy transitions into kinetic energy, and a form narrowly balanced can express both.
Over the last 20 years I’ve mastered several traditional sculptural media, including wood, bronze, and steel, and have pioneered within the sculptural field several others, including carbon fiber composite and ultra-high-performance concrete. Each material has its strengths and limitations, and matching the material to the multi-faceted demands of a project is something I care a great deal about.
