This month, Collections Assistant, Louise Smith, explores the work of Prunella Clough, whose work features in the latest Arts Council Collection touring exhibition The Printed Line.
Clough was born in London in 1919, she studied at Chelsea School of Art and during the war worked as a cartographer for the Office of War Information, producing charts and maps. In Clough’s early work she painted industrial landscapes, focussing on the labour taking place in these landscapes, describing details such as the drivers in the lorry cabs, and the men climbing cranes on the building sites. Clough didn’t belong to a group of artists and was quite isolated in the way she worked. During the 60s and 70s Clough started to hone in on certain aspects of the urban wasteland - reflecting on everyday discarded objects and mundane vignettes. These objects and scenes became more abstracted later in her career.
Clough is known mainly for her paintings but she also made prints and created assemblages from collected objects. Clough made notes on scenes and colours of a landscape, and always carried a camera which she used not for reproducing but to capture the atmosphere and feel of a landscape, compositions and shapes of unnoticed objects to create her own visual language. During her teaching at Chelsea School of Art in 1954, Clough started to use etchings to create simple images - it was a new medium for her and she drew through the hard ground etching plate to create a series of line drawings. Most of these etchings were unrelated to Clough’s paintings and industrial scenes at the time and she did not edition these prints. She later brought the technique back into her practice.