Wayne CLEMENTS (Great Britain)
Wayne Clements (1960, Havant, Hampshire, England) – poet, artist, lingua-artist. Studied General History and Arts History at the Oxford Polytechnic (BA, 1978-81), Literature, History and Philosophy of the XIXth century at the Keele University (1981-83), Social Patronage at the Kent University (ÌÀ, 1985-87). Since 1996 he took a course on theoretical and practical issues of Fine Arts at the Chelsea College of Art. For several years he did part-time jobs at various social services. From 1987 till 1990 he worked for the Barking Social Services Department in London, later in Chichester in the Greylingwell Psychiatric Hospital. In 1992 – 1994 Clements worked at the Drug Advice Clinic in Portsmouth. He started his creative literary and artistic activities in the late 1980s. He is the author of a number of poetic publications in British magazines and literary miscellanies, including such as: “Shrike,” “And,” “Angel Exhaust,” “Terrible Work,” etc. In February, 2000 he published a book of visual poetry titled Depressions Strokes (London: Writes Forum, 2000) in the publishing house Writers Forum that specializes in publishing non-conventional literature. Clements’s selected experimental poetry productions were represented in the literary magazine “Polartis” (Australia, 2000). Most of the original visual poetry productions can be viewed as the author’s constructivist activity of replacing texts with graphic compositions. Strict crystalline lattices built from various verbal and non-verbal elements condition, according to the author’s original idea, their spacial interaction, making up something indivisible, on the one hand, and on the other – preserving their specific and individual nature. Since 1995, Clements has been a freelance, participating in various collective exhibitions of contemporary art, such as Whitechapel Open (London, 1995), Articultural Show (Royal Festival Hall, London, 1999). His solo art exhibition, bringing together the recent works, took place in Tricycle Gallery (London). He is also a regular participant of the poetic colloquia Writers Forum (London) where he has presented his productions and tape recorded plays. Clements’s sound poetry works clearly resemble audio-artistic performance that results in the creation of a certain noise field (according to the author “a field of abstract linguistic elements”). Manipulations with recording equipment based on faults, side noises and defects, bring the author to the production of “texts” of emphasised semantic vagueness, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, engage the listener in the intertextual activity aimed at building up their own senses. It is quite significant that Clements’s sound poetry works, comprising of his original collection (“Change the Record,” “Imagine the Following Actions,” “Speaker Output,” etc.), are not marked according to the time and tracks, but according to the readings of the tape recorder meter, thus imposing on the listener the concept of poetry production as having purely mechanical duration. Wayne Clements lives and works in London (Great Britain).
