"Untitled, from Pareidolia series" Painting

Asiya Clarke grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe. She completed a BA Fine Art at the University of Cape town in 1976. She spent a year in Jerusalem studying Sufism. After moving to the UK she raised a family and set up a full time practice and running of classes in 1993. She exhibited locally and in London winning the St Albans Open in 2003. Awarded by University of Hertfordshire, this took the form of a solo exhibition at the Margaret Harvey gallery, for which she was awarded an Arts Council grant. She went on to complete an MA Arts Practice at Goldsmiths College in 2008. Her degree show work was selected for Saatchi 4 New Sensations. She has exhibited locally and abroad; including several solo shows, numerous group shows and taken part repeatedly in Open Studios. She has work in private and public collections. ​Asiya Clarke’s work examines the relationship between the parts and the whole. Starting with images of water, she playfully imagines the beginnings of creation, the emergence of the particular from a great undifferentiated mass finding patterns and structures that are both universal and ephemeral. She investigates how an image grabs our attention, how all symmetry, such as the doubling in a reflection or a Rorschach blot, seems to relate to the body and particularly the face, figuration appearing within abstraction, presenting a private gateway to a parallel reality. Pareidolia, the title for her latest body of work, is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus being perceived as significant, in other words finding meanings in arbitrary or chance data. Predominantly abstract, the work hints at figuration and therefore has an element of surrealism. How little it takes to evoke a face, even one circle becomes an eye, so compelling is the urge to find meaning in the apparently random. Her life and work are informed by Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, that requires a temporary loss of ego, allowing an immersion in the universal. She is preoccupied with self transcendence and the desire to “gaze upon mystery”.