Clive Knights practices both art and architecture, in particular mixed media collage, monotype printmaking and the design and installation of unique festival structures in collaboration with colleagues and students from Portland State University School of Architecture, where he is a professor. Originally from England, he currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon, USA. He holds professional arts & architectural design degrees from Portsmouth Polytechnic, UK, and a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge University. He has written on the cultural interpretation of works of art understood through the phenomenology of the human body, with particular reference to the efficacy of metaphor in poetic works. He has exhibited architectural design work internationally, including three projects at the 1985 Venice Biennale. He has shown mixed media art work, collages and monotypes in about 30 juried group shows across multiple US states and half a dozen countries, since 2016. Most recently his collages, non-fiction and fiction writing have been included in four issues of Kolaj Magazine.
Ironically, collage might be the most liberating creative medium. Despite being founded on a process of gathering image material already wrapped up in a context, previously spent, so to speak, in contributing to former intentions of which the collage-maker played no part, it nevertheless demands an intuitive, extemporary practice. Therein lies its potency in reconfiguring fragments of an existing world - already underway, already connected to fields of meaning that animate our shared human lifeworld - into new gestures, innovations drawn out of familiar terrain. In upcycling the residuum of everyday life, each collage aims to reinvigorate our engagement with mundane existence by means of metaphoric shift, analogical projection, seeing something as something it is not, recognizing similarity in difference, jogging us out of a preconceived understanding of the way things are, towards a vision of how things could be.
