Notes on Gareth Lloyd’s Figures of Clay

Yulia Kim

Selected for RE: VISION, 16th East Wing Biennial. 

Figures of Clay by Gareth Lloyd, 2023. Credit: Gareth Lloyd Studio

Gareth Lloyd’s Figures of Clay does not settle as a painting but drifts into view like an apparition. A folding table, drawn with spare lines, anchors us in the ordinary, yet the objects resting on it begin to slip away from certainty. They appear in a faded graphite green, half-emerging, half-dissolving, as if memory itself were trying to take shape. They are not statues in any fixed sense, nor ghosts disappearing into nothing, but something in between; traces that feel as though a ritual has passed through and left its afterimage behind. 

Reading Gareth Lloyd’s studio transposition, clay is not merely a material but a medium of ritual. He does not approach clay in a traditional sculptural manner; instead, he treats it as part of a provisional picture-making method, combining it with graphite powder and sweeping it across the surface in a single brushstroke. What emerges is less the tactile impression of hands pressing and shaping than the ghostly residue of gesture itself, forms partly erased, dusty, and unstable, as if suspended between states. In this sense, clay becomes a medium of ritual not through modelling, but through the act of transposition: a material usually bound to weight and solidity, reconfigured into something spectral, fleeting, and visionary. Clay itself bears a double function here: it grounds the work in material presence while at the same time opening onto its possibilities. The work reconfigures space through clay as a primordial medium and, by intensifying the spectator’s senses, evokes a moment akin to a hierophany, a manifestation of the divine. The overwhelm and fascination of that moment – what Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (1917) described as the numinous, propel the viewer into a transitional state beyond ordinary perception, generating a shared energy of focus and cohesion. I approach this work as a ritual configuration in which material, gesture, and space ignite one another.  

In this shifting presence, the table becomes less a piece of furniture and more an altar. The plainness of its form only heightens the strangeness of what it carries, turning the surface into a site of invocation. The figures do not present themselves directly but hover in their incompleteness, and it is precisely this refusal to arrive fully that gives them weight. They pull us into a space where seeing and not-seeing overlap, where the hallowed does not declare itself but trembles at the edge of perception. As the gaze lingers, we notice how the painting’s stillness begins to work like a rhythm. The longer we stay, the more we shift from simply looking to quietly dwelling, caught inside the interval between apparition and object. This interval feels ritualistic, though not through spectacle or ceremony, but through its quiet insistence, a steady breathing, a compulsion to remain. Immersion arrives not as revelation but as a deepening, a sense of being absorbed into the work’s own unfinished pulse.  

Gareth Lloyd begins his long and errant preparation for Figures of Clay with Antonin Artaud’s Journey to Mexico. When Artaud left Europe in 1936, he was not simply travelling abroad but fleeing what he called the decay of European civilisation in search of what he named a “vital form of culture”. Among the Tarahumara in the mountains of Chihuahua, he encountered rituals in which the ingestion of peyote opened onto a different order of life, one where communal behaviour was rooted in the soil and bound to the rhythms of earth and sun. Such an experience can be read not merely as a descent into madness, but as what Victor Turner would call a passage of initiation (1969), an in-between state in which ordinary categories dissolve and the self is temporarily unmade. This suspension of the everyday discloses an intermediate zone between dissolution and transformation. It is within this zone that Gareth Lloyd’s own interests take root, the possibility that the individual might be remade and re-sanctified, sustained by new icons and myths, and thereby positioned as a figure of resistance against oppressive ideologies.  

From here, Gareth Lloyd’s reading of Artaud led him to Wat Thamkrabok, a monastery whose surreal presence is marked by a great cluster of Buddha statues rising from a hillside in the Phra Phutthabat district of Saraburi Province, Thailand. The monastery is renowned for its spiritual and healing mission, its mountainous surroundings offering a natural backdrop for meditation and inner stillness. Gareth Lloyd’s encounter here was not only with Buddhism, but with the molten casting ritual of the monks, another crossing, though in a different register. Its logic is not hallucinatory but material: heat, delay, and repetition. Each stage of containment and endurance carries participants away from profane time into ritual temporality, where form emerges only through patience and restraint. Like the Tarahumara ceremonies, this process unsettles habitual perception and creates an altered attentional field, one in which material and spiritual agency converge.  

Figures of Clay stages the convergence of two gateways: Artaud’s ecstatic dissolution and the monastic endurance of Wat Thamkrabok. On one side lies the hallucinatory trace of Artaud’s pursuit of the human form, “relentlessly pursued from every side”; on the other, the ritual discipline of Wat Thamkrabok, where temperature, interval, and iteration become the structure of form. The work inhabits this intermediate zone without seeking to resolve its polarities. Instead, it becomes a diagram haunted by the numinous, where hallucination and asceticism fuse into an intensified presence. To encounter the work is to step into this fold, where rapture and discipline interlace and the transcendent passes not as fixed symbol but as lived intensity, a rituality embodied in quiet compulsion, a choreography of concentration. In this dwelling, the viewer shifts from “seer” to “dweller”. It is within this shift that the unity of overwhelm, immersion, and the temporary, unfold.  

RE:VISION runs until August 2027 at The Courtauld Institute, Vernon Square, Penton Rise WC1X 9EW https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/the-16th-east-wing-biennial-revision/