Goodnestone Contemporary

Joseph Clarke
15 August – 31st October 2025
Goodnestone Contemporary

Time Served is a personal and material study on labour, endurance, and repetition. Continuing Joseph Clarke’s exploration of absence, displacement, and architectural trace, this exhibition brings these themes into sharper focus through the lens of familial experience.

Across a new series of sculptural wall reliefs, Clarke reflects on the muted resilience embedded in manual processes and the persistence of routines that shape structures and material presence. Materials such as steel and copper pipe, rubber stable matting, and folded canvas recur throughout, chosen for their capacity to register use, neglect, and care. Surfaces are deliberately left unfinished—marked by paint, tar, and abrasion—to accumulate evidence of touch, movement, and time.

Industrial and equestrian references combine to create fragmented reliefs and sculptural forms—an uncertain inventory of gestures: to place, to mark, to cut. Repetition echoes the rhythms of labour and the endurance required to sustain it. Forms remain provisional, structures held in tension. Instability becomes method, challenging conventional ideas of completion and permanence. These installations invite reflection on what is built—and what resists resolution.

Clarke’s work foregrounds how built forms absorb action over time, considering how physical labour imprints itself through friction, weight, and repair. Familiar materials are stripped of their utility and repurposed symbolically, navigating the space between order and interruption, stability and collapse.

“Bletting the Mother Beast” was a solo exhibition by Margate-based artist Mercedes Lucy, presenting an intimate and visceral body of work that reflected on grief, transformation, and the softening that comes through time and rupture.

Taking its name from the process of bletting—the stage when fruit begins to break down, becoming tender and edible only after decay—the exhibition explored the slow undoing and reshaping that grief demands. Through hanging sculptures and vessels alongside sound and textiles, Mercedes Lucy navigated personal and collective experiences of loss, motherhood, and identity. The work invited viewers into a space where decay was not failure, but a site of care, memory, and quiet renewal. “This show is about fully immersing the viewer in my world—the chaos and the calm. Each piece is a story, formed in moments of stillness and upheaval.”

Rich in texture and form, the pieces balanced heaviness with delicacy. Clay became a vessel for both emotion and process—formed, fired, fractured, and held. Some works hinted at the bodily and the domestic, while others leaned into abstraction, offering space for reflection and stillness, blurring the boundary between the functional and the sculptural. The hand-built forms carried traces of the body and the landscape, crafted with attention to texture, weight, and emotion. This body of work pushed further, allowing space for mess, softness, and ambiguity.

Mercedes Lucy’s practice centres on material sensitivity and emotional resonance. Her hand-built ceramics draw from the natural world, the rhythms of domestic life, and the weight of inherited experience. Rooted in a meditative approach to making, her work resists urgency in favour of slow, grounded attention.

The exhibition found a perfect home at Goodnestone Park—a setting that mirrored Mercedes Lucy’s practice in its immersion, depth, and natural complexity. The Kent countryside, where she was born and raised, is deeply embedded in her creative identity. “To show this work in such a layered, sensory place felt perfect. The garden holds the same contradictions I try to reflect; grief and growth, quiet and intensity, structure and wildness.”

Mercedes is a permanent studio holder at Tracey Emin’s TKE Studios in Margate. Her work has previously been exhibited with Saatchi Gallery, Matt’s Gallery and Flowers Gallery.

“Bletting the Mother Beast” marked her first solo exhibition since 2023.