Clinton Gorst

Creating otherworldly and surreal new environments, Clinton Gorst works predominantly with analogue collage. Clinton is a Sydney based artist who started collaging at a young age when his love of music led to creating his own bespoke 7-inch record sleeves of his favourite artists. He found great inspiration during his time spent in London in the 90’s which led to a heightened interest in graphic design, which Clinton then studied at the design college in Wellington, New Zealand. Simultaneously he had his first solo exhibition of collages at Neut Gallery and after graduating in 2001 he relocated to Sydney to focus on his visual career.

Clintons works are created by combining dozens of meticulously cut pieces which then form a new, alternate world. Using original pages from vintage books as resources means he only gets one chance to cut out these objects and this also creates limitations for size. A recent development of custom-printing backgrounds has allowed Clinton to create largescale works within his seamless photomontage process. Storytelling is an important part of Clintons creations and themes can include Brutalist or Modernist architecture, sci-fi and technology to commenting on the climate crisis or creating portals to another dimension. This retro-futuristic vision of space and science lead to Clinton’s significant involvement in FUTURE, his first regional gallery showing at Casula Powerhouse in 2019 which was selected by ART GUIDE AUSTRALIA as one of the top 5 exhibitions to see nationwide. More recently he was asked to be part of BARE BONES at AIRspace projects, where the artists were asked to respond to the poems of JR Waen and through this project, Clinton returned to a focus on people and humanity, a theme that was prominent in his early Pop-style works from the ‘90’s.