Collect Week: Kendall Clarke - 5 Minutes with a Friend
Kendall Clarke creates wall art and sculptures inspired by the elegance and simplicity of both traditional and contemporary Japanese crafts. Her work is defined by fine detail and a delicate, thoughtful approach to materials and form.
Through a mix of painting, mark-making, erasure, and other techniques woven into her process, she builds layered, intricate pieces that explore surface, depth, and the passage of time. She enjoys experimenting with materials, particularly paper and paper-like yarns, to push the boundaries of texture and structure.
At the core of her work is a fascination with fragility and resilience, impermanence and endurance. She is especially drawn to handwritten marks—the way their meanings fade, fragment, and disappear over time—turning them into a reflection on memory, loss, and transformation.
In today’s 5 Minutes with a Friend, we sit down with Kendall to talk about how textiles have shaped and inspired her artistic journey.
What is your first memory of textiles?
I remember the old-fashioned eiderdown my Nan would put on my bed when I stayed at her (unheated) house. It was so heavy that I would be almost unable to turn over, but it was so cosy and comforting. I also had a ‘comfort blanket’ when I was very young. It was a really soft, pink cotton blanket that I used to hold against my face while I slept. I kept it throughout my childhood, and I still have a fragment of the cloth now – though I don’t sleep with it any more.
Both these early memories are about the physicality of textiles – the feel, texture, even scent – and the comfort they bring.
Reductive, Kendall Clarke
Where is your most inspiring space/ place to create?
When you’re a weaver, you have to work where your loom is! I have a warm, light space at Cockpit Studios, Bloomsbury, with enough room to weave, teach, make my paper yarn and experiment with natural dyes. It’s a relaxed space where I don’t have to worry about making a mess. Best of all, I’m surrounded by artists and makers whose work I admire and am inspired by. But when you’re a maker or artist, a large part of the creative process happens before you even get to the loom. It’s happening all the time, everywhere – when I’m researching, when I’m reading, when I’m out seeing things in London, when I’m walking the dogs in the countryside. If there’s one place that’s most inspiring to me, it’s got to be Japan: the Japan of my imagination and memory as much as the real Japan around me when I’m there.
Reductive (Detail II), Kendall Clarke
Where did you learn your craft?
Like a lot of people, I started making textiles with family. With weaving specifically, I taught myself initially, but then went on to more formal education once I realised I’d found my metier. Although I did an MA at UCA, Farnham, it’s always been a case of who rather than where that’s been important in my learning and I’ve had several significant mentors. They may have encouraged me in early days, or helped me pluck up the courage to be an artist, or guided me through the difficulties of an independent artist’s life, or of course taught me specific skills.
Really, I’m still learning. Just last year, I went to study in Japan (on a QEST scholarship sponsored by Sanderson Design Co.) with renowned paper yarn expert Hiroko Karuno. It’s a material I use extensively in my work and Hiroko gave me an incredible grounding in traditional methods, techniques and materials so that I can now make authentic ‘Japanese’ yarns myself. I’m passing on what I’ve learned to others through my teaching.
Reductive (Detail), Kendall Clarke
What is the inspiration behind your work for Collect 2025?
This piece came out of an interest in traces of the human hand and their survival over time. In the work, an ancient Egyptian text, written in a now extinct script, is etched into the surface of the woven panels, and gradually deconstructed as it moves down each panel. It speaks to precarity and randomness, and how time renders connection and understanding difficult. The link between past and present is fragile but ultimately resilient. Everybody has experienced loss and vulnerability, and the play of light and shadow that the combination of transparency and opacity creates, seems to connect emotionally with those feelings.
Technically, I was interested in how to render organic, calligraphic shapes in an essentially geometric medium. My attempt in this piece uses the devoré technique to etch out the writing. This was an extremely risky process as it involved applying an unpredictable, corrosive chemical to painstakingly woven monofilament and paper panels. Needless to say, a lot of sampling was involved before I dared attempt it on the final, finished piece.
Reductive (Detail), Kendall Clarke
What is it you love about textiles?
I love the universality of textiles and their emotional and sensory power. Textiles have universal connections – across cultures and time – and so many associations with ordinary life that they tap straight into our wordless selves. I always want to touch a textile, so I guess their tactile nature is something that has a very strong appeal for me. And of course, the magic of being able to conjure a fabric out of strands of yarn has an enduring fascination for a weaver.
Kendall Clarke is exhibiting as part of the Crafts Council Collect Art Fair in the East Wing of Somerset House, with the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust X Society of Designer Craftsmen.
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Further Information:
Website: Kendall Clarke
Instagram: @_kendallclarke
Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST)
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Image Credits:
Lead Image and 6: Reductive, Kendall Clarke. Image by Peer Lindgreen
2: Justyna Kulam
3: Emilie Nunn
4/5: Kendall Clarke