Prunella Clough

A child’s plastic toy, a sweet wrapper, bubble wrap or a computer game. Such bits and pieces of our everyday world are some of the unlikely starting points for Prunella Clough’s paintings. From the early pictures of the fishing harbour at Lowestoft, factories and printing works, Clough has gleaned fragments from a largely urban, sometimes industrial and increasingly technological environment.

Throughout there has been an equation drawn between the signals given off by objects and the artist’s capacity to make signs. Her early years in commercial graphic design, wartime mapmaking and a continuing engagement with print-making seem to have contributed to the graphic qualities to her painting which disregard any boundary between the figurative and abstract. Above all, hers is an art of transformations which speaks of the physical and mental experience of painting.