I'm a Scottish person living in Burntisland, Fife on the East coast of Scotland. I use words, sounds, images , objects and materials to explore ideas across and between forms.  I tend to think of it as stuff that is all part of the same process of inquiry. I have been commissioned to read/perform/exhibit my work at arts and literary festivals, in car parks, art galleries and in the woods, across the UK and beyond, and have written and performed stand up comedy, produced and released music /sound art both in my own right and in collaboration. My written and hybrid /multidisciplinary work appears in several academic and small press books, and in print and online journals and platforms in the UK and internationally.  I have also begun to make books and zines under my own imprint Versions of Undefined and am particularly interested in what I have termed the Writer's Art, so far making a somewhat glossy and elaborate zine and a clothbound text and images book, Monologues in Motion as an interactive text for The Dreams of Exiled Souls group show (2023) that I had work in. A range of my multimedia, hybrid work relating to giving birth to a baby that it is known will die shortly afterwards has been acquisitioned by the Wellcome Collection in London. This my single poem pamphlet Flight or Fight (2014) my text, drawing, and photography zine Those Times Bill Callahan Came to Fife and Hung Out in Scotland (2023) and my forthcoming book The Absolution of Shyness. I have a studio/exhibition space in a disused card shop in my nearest town as part of a collective, Paper Echoes, with Hazel Terry and Pat Bray via the OuterSpaces programme and will be  making and showing new work there. I have a  radio show  Versions of Undefined  which explores wider project ideas of autodidactism, craft, process, hybridity, definitions of inside and out, encounter and audience. Other vaguely up to date work may or may not be referenced in the news/updates. section. I was funded by Creative Scotland in 2023 to attend an experimental practice residency with Oren Ambarchi and Crys Cole in France and have since set up Superstring Category Error, an improv collective, as a result. I will be migrating my site from Wix as soon as is practical

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 I use experimental processes to explore articulation, time, place, movement, and the between spaces of the real and imagined, the private and the public, and the autodidactic and the academic (and the intersections and gaps between all of these, and points of transformation). I coined a phrase "the applicable tenses of" that I have used in various iterations as the title for written pieces and photographs and it perhaps best exemplifies what I am trying to work out, without fully knowing what that is. Maybe the multiple selves/realities that collide in the moment between the private and the public? I have no great plan and am driven by interest and hopefully a sense of more than me, despite much of my work emanating from experience. I am interested in the dreamscape of frank yet elusive truths, nuance and the blur of imperfection. I also like  transformation by light and dark, concrete, graffiti, the sea, entropy, caravans, car parks, dogs, and other people's windows yet dislike tropes. I have collaborated with a range of musicians, artists and writers in making work and have also produced several pieces in creative dialogue, site specific experience and collaboration with the wider public in the UK and internationally on a range of ideas from lone gig going to darkness. I create, curate and chair a range of events from installations to book launches and am always interested in the possibilities of new ways of working.

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Although I have organised some examples into sections here, much of my work exists across and between and the facts are never up to date or finite. Prior physical making has included Birl of Unmap, my collaborative album response to the then abandoned Charles Jencks Fife Earth project, (nominated for Scottish Album of the Year, and chosen as one of the top 100 essential albums of this year by The Quietus, and Top Ten drone albums of 2022 by A Closer Listen)) . I invited Kinbrae to make Birl of Unmap with me as fellow Fife artists with a mutual interest in place. In addition to originating the album, album concept and subsequent tracks concepts, I undertook oral history and archive research and recording, wrote, performed, played, sang, undertook field recordings, directed and arranged other input, additionally arranged the music, and drew the art card accompanying the Monorail exclusive limited edition CD. I now have my own Bandcamp which I wish I had had at the time of release. Solo work has also been released at The Dark Outside and Blackford Hill Audio

 

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Writing

I had my first fiction piece, Foot-binding, published in 2013, at 43, in Push, a limited edition sold on the street lit mag, (alongside writers such as Jenni Fagan and David Peace) and have since been published in print and online in a diverse range of UK and international publications including Gorse, and the Stinging Fly (where my piece, Parallel of Past Imperfect, was commissioned and edited by Sally Rooney) and academic presses such as of Manchester University and Cornell/Leuven University I also took part in Poettrio, a collaborative writing as transIation project at the University of Newcastle. I also have had writing as text and voice installed as part of the 2015 Project Afterbirth exhibition at the White Moose Gallery in Devon. 

I was chosen to read my fiction The Sweetie Wife at Edinburgh International Book Festival's Storyshop for emerging writers in 2014 (later runner up in the Hysteria Prize). My first piece of nonfiction work, Meandering Route of the Muscle Memories, was chosen for inclusion in the Book Week Scotland anthology in 2015.  My text also exists off the page in various ways.

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In 2016 I was long-listed in the international experimental nonfiction prize run by the Lifted Brow/RMIT in Australia (judged by Dodie Bellamy, Kate Zambreno & Helen MacDonald) for When Flakes of Ash Fall and Melt Into Water, a section of The Absolution of Shyness, my hybrid sequence of experimental autobiographical abstractions exploring articulation, expected neonatal death, place, connection, points of life, death and belief, autodidactism and process, and what of the private we make public and why. The Absolution of Shyness incorporates text, images, video, sound, paintings, drawings,objects and performance and is iterative in form. Some sections are currently available, others will be when the work as a whole is made public in forthcoming installation/release/print. I was funded by Scottish Books International in September 2022 to undertake concluding experiential research for the Absolution of Shyness in Bologna, Italy. I was also funded to be able to take up of the offer of a multidisciplinary guest writer place at Write Toscana in order to conclude the Absolution of Shyness.

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I have written and performed stand up comedy and have written articles, reviews and undertaken interviews for arts and music journals including The Quietus, Minor Literatures, and Gold Flake Paint. 

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Images

Much of my image based work ensues from repetitive looking and being in the place (s) and spaces of Burntisland and the between spaces of the everyday real and imagined of there and elsewhere. I have had my photography and moving image work commissioned/exhibited in the UK and Ireland and have also been invited to speak about my text and image practice at academic conferences such as the Digital Re-enchantment Conference run by Manchester Metropolitan University in 2016 and as art of the Architecture Fringe in Edinburgh, 2018. I was commissioned by the Not Quite Light Festival in Salford in 2018 and 2019. A series of images was commissioned by writer/editor Jenn Ashworth for Lune Journal, a journal of experimental writing. Soma Gosh interviewed me about my text and image practice for the Demented Goddess magazine in which I also have text and image work on my filmmaking process.

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Memories of Contort, 2019 (stills, video and spoken word) was commissioned by Gorse/The Pickled Body and installed in the Illuminations Gallery at Maynooth University, Ireland as part of the Form Ever Follows Function exhibition. I also composed and performed the sound. 

I made my 21 minutes artist moving image installation Can You Hear the Interim  (2020) as part of a postgraduate MSc in experimental Filmmaking and Media Arts at Glasgow University, graduating with first class distinction in December 2020. I composed, performed and arranged the soundtrack using harmonium, harmonica, field recordings and electronics. It has since been mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space and the film and soundtrack will be released as part of my The Absolution of Shyness hybrid book project.

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I published a selection from my series of Transmitter/Transformation photographs of the Craigkelly transmitter on the Binn (hill), Burntisland in my work 'in the to and fro of unknown dialogue there are component truths' in issue 2 of Oscillations Journal. Accompanied by text, the photographs exemplify my love of blur, transformation by weather and darkness, points of in between, and repetitive looking from a point in place and the layers of before.

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Text and image work, Ghost Trains of Lockdown, relating to empty trains passing through Burntisland during the pandemic was commissioned by Chroma Editions for From Tarmac to Towpath: Excursions Into Lockdown

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In 2021 I was invited to make a 1 min 15 secs experimental film, Swallow, about my fridge for a collage work by women from 3 continents curated by writer /artist Susanna Crossman and shown at Carthorse Orchestra, an online literary and philosophical salon run by David Collard on 19th June 2021. 

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I have a pamphlet of text and images forthcoming with Gorse Editions in 2024 (I change this every year but it will happen). These are just some examples - nowhere is ever up to date. 

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Sound 

Having worked a lot with spoken word I became increasingly interested in working with sound, making several pieces over the years such as filmpoems solo and in collaboration with others. I undertook an ecoacoustics residency with composers/sound artists Annea Lockwood and Leah Barclay in 2019, following an initial self led residency at Camp in France  in 2018 exploring field recording and use of instruments. I am on Bandcamp as Clare Archibald/Applicable Tenses - follow button in the social bar at the top of this page

I composed/designed and performed the sound for Can You Hear the Interim (2020) using electronics, field recordings, harmonium, piano and harmonica. In 2020 I also released a soundscape (field and binaural recordings, spoken word), Memory of Unrepeat (Slow Notes for Voegelin) as part of a the Slow Notes series by Broken 20 records.

I created my first sound only piece (without words), We Were Never Real, for the Dark Outside broadcast as part of Aerial Festival in 2020. Prior to this I created a spoken word/harmonica piece for The Dark Outside as part of the Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture event in 2019. I also contributed a track, Acts of Unsay, to the Biblioptapes/The Dark Outside  album Diary Of a Madman, a fundraiser for Ukraine in 2022. My track 'night lull in asteroids of human' appears on the Peace and Plenty compilation from Blackford Hill Audio, which A Closer Listen called "the greatest gut punch" in their review.

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In September 2021 I originated and produced "if trees were lone women what would they sound like", my site specific sound installation commissioned by Sanctuary Lab, a public engagement work that brought together the sounds, music and words of 141 women, in 10 languages, from  5 continents around the world in the trees of Galloway Forest Dark Sky Park over a 24 hour period.

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Birl of Unmap a Help Musicians Fusion Funded album with Scottish composers Kinbrae is my collaborative response to St Ninian's, a former mining site/ Charles Jencks land art site near Kelty in Fife. Released on 11th February 2022 by Full Spectrum Records in the US and The Dark Outside in the UK, on tape and CD, the album received widespread radio play across the BBC, KEXP, and a host of experimental and community stations in the UK, US and around the world, with the CD and UK tape selling out within 48 hours. Birl of Unmap was performed live at the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh on 27th April, 2022 as part of James Yorkston's Tae Sup series and there was a special edition t short collaboration with 1 of 100.  

  

" What sets Birl of Unmap is the voices...It’s a beautifully arranged work, with full credit to Clare Archibald for allowing space for the contributors but keeping the voices embedded in the music rather than sitting on top. It’s her research and recordings that give Birl Of Unmap a historical heft, the real sense of location and time" A Closer Listen, 2022

 

"There is no single word evocation of a place, of the situation, of its people,” says Clare Archibald on ‘Excavate Of Other (The Unknowing)'. It serves as a frisson inducing modus operandi for Birl Of Unmap, her new collaboration with Kinbrae. Co-released by Texas’ Full Spectrum Records and Scotland’s The Dark Outside, the tape sees the trio use poetry, fragments of testimony and a lilting soundtrack of strings, brass and earthy atmospherics to decode what turns a space into a place" The Quietus, 2022

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I am working on a solo album and will also be releasing my Can You Hear the Interim  (2020) soundtrack (mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space) in conjunction with an installation of the work. I am also releasing a collaborative album Smooring the Fire recorded in Inchindown  Tunnel via Rural Situationism in early 2024.

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I am currently working on a range of projects across the various disciplines that I do stuff in but am always open to ideas so please feel free to contact me. Join my mailing list for work updates 

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I'm still finishing stuff. This is not a shop window nor even a window to my soul. Though I may be selling some prints here soon and am in fact selling a Bill Callahan zine in my new shop.

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I also founded & co-ordinate  Lone Women in Flashes of Wilderness project and have undertaken various commissions including Sanctuary Lab Visual Arts, the Not Quite Light Festival. I was commissioned as part of the first ever London Borough of Culture celebrations in Waltham Forest 2019, to design and led the first ever all women night walk in Epping Forest. 

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   All words, sounds & images are copyright to me unless otherwise stated. If you would like to use any please just ask me.