Cliff Andrade
Cliff studied BA Communication Design at the prestigious Glasgow School of Art, graduating first class with honours, before studying for a Masters in Print at the Royal College of Art, where he was the Tony Snowdon Scholar for 2018-2020. He also holds a BSc (Hons) in Economics and Politics from the University of Bristol. He is a previous winner of the Jill Todd Photo Award, and has been a finalist for both the Association of Photographers Award and the Aesthetica Art Prize. He has exhibited work at a variety of galleries including the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Streetlevel Photoworks in Glasgow, Southwark Park Galleries in London and Spike Island in Bristol. His practice is multi-disciplinary, taking in drawing, printmaking, photography, film and installation.
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I like telling stories.
I like being from two cultures, but not really belonging to either. I like having my own experience of the immigrant story.
I worry the experiences I grew up with will disappear into history if I do not make them into stories. I like to release my stories into the world to challenge dominant notions of identity.
And memory.
I made a series of prints based on my parents’ experience of immigration.
I like that stories are based on memory. I like to explore the unreliability of memory. I am sure the things we remember never existed in the way we think they did.
I like to think about the consequences of basing our identity on something so unreliable.
And on place.
I like to explore the relationship between memory and place.
I like to wander around the areas I now find myself in and compare them to ‘home’. Did the place I recall as ‘home’ ever really exist?
I like borrowing from others for my stories. If you have a split identity, you have to borrow to fill the gaps.
I like the directness of drawing as a way to get the stories out of my head. I worry that tradition is inclined to not consider drawings ‘proper’ art. I use printmaking to give them more ‘weight’.
I like photography. As with stories, you decide what to tell and what to leave out of the frame.
I like to consider whether photography is a friend or a foe to memory.
I worry I place too much emphasis on my stories. I worry this stops me fully engaging with the present.
And I wonder whether one day I can find a way to escape my stories altogether.
Works
Split-Identity
“To have a critical consciousness you must first have a sense of what you really are historically, although your history is a result of a huge jumble of traces left inside you.”
– Edward Said, paraphrasing Antonio Gramsci
“My work is my way of yelling to my ancestors and my past that I have not forgotten you; I have not forgotten you, I have not abandoned you and I am trying to find you.”
– Curtis Talwst Santiago
“what we are seeking … through our religious accumulation of personal accounts, documents, images and all the ‘visible signs of what used to be’, is what is different about us now; and ‘within the spectacle of this difference the sudden flash of an unfindable identity. No longer a genesis, but the deciphering of what we are in the light of what we are no longer’.”
– Marc Auge, quoting Pierre Nora
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but it has, comeu tudo (triptych) giclee prints on fine art archival paper
45cm x 30cm (x3) [triptych]
2020
edition of 10
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A triptych of photographic collages comprising an etching, a lithograph, and an etching again (respectively) accompanied by digital photographs, scanned analogue photographs and scanned printed matter from personal archive.
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but it has, comeu tudo (dreams of patria) giclee print on fine art archival paper
45cm x 30cm
2020
edition of 10
A photographic collage comprising an etching accompanied by digital photographs, scanned analogue photographs and scanned printed matter from personal archive.
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but it has, comeu tudo (lusotropicalismo) giclee print on fine art archival paper
45cm x 30cm
2019
edition of 10
A photographic collage comprising a lithograph accompanied by digital photographs, scanned analogue photographs and scanned printed matter from personal archive.
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but it has, comeu tudo (the poor women had to do bloody everything) giclee print on fine art archival paper
45cm x 30cm
2019
edition of 10
A photographic collage comprising an etching accompanied by digital photographs, scanned analogue photographs and scanned printed matter from personal archive.
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a tale of two Madeira cakes sculptural installation comprised of Madeira cake, madeira cake, and found and donated objects (three wooden chairs, folding kitchen table, plastic tablecloth, ceramic plate, two ceramic mugs, a knife, a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of wine and a Portuguese ceramic cockerel).
200cm x 200cm (approx.)
2020
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a tale of two Madeira cakes (tabletop detail) -
a tale of two madeira cakes (under table detail) -
they always said this land não ia comer os seus ossos (a series of three prints) etching and aquatint on fine art paper & lithography on fine art paper.
60cm x 42cm; 60cm x 72cm; 60cm x 42cm
2020; 2020; 2019
each available in an edition of 10
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dreams of pátria etching and aquatint on fine art paper
60cm x 42cm
2020
edition of 10
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lusotropicalismo lithography on fine art paper.
60cm x 72cm
2020
edition of 10
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the poor women had to do bloody everything etching and aquatint on fine art paper
60cm x 42cm
2019
edition of 10
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Walking
“The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.”
– Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
“…I regularly set off to explore the outlying districts of the city… to walk through the empty Sunday streets taking hundreds of banlieu-photographs, as I called them, pictures which in their very emptiness, as I realised only later, reflected my orphaned frame of mind.”
– W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
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Solvitur Ambulando 16mins
2020
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F330156 (no place like home part 2) handmade, blizzard-bound, risograph and screen printed artist’s book
10.5cm x 15cm
2020
edition of 15
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Two Walkers in Conversation (no place like home part 1) ordnance survey map, analogue photographs from archive, and laser-printed photographs on recycled paper, presented in wood-framed, glass display case
150cm x 200cm
2019
unique
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Saudade a photographic series of 38 images
25.4cm x 20.32cm [x38]
2014
unique
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Proposals
I am looking for collaboration and/or funding opportunities to continue to realise projects currently in development. If you are a gallery wishing to have a discussion, or if you have any suggestions for funding possibilities, please get in touch.
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Proposal: be good in school so não tens que andar limpando casas como mim 6 mins
2020
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