Jock Clutterbuck Timeless Duration

Over the course of a highly productive career Jock Clutterbuck’s sculpture and prints have celebrated the intangible as well as being a homage to both the Australian landscape and the esoteric world of the imagination.

On his visit to Australia in 1968 the American art critic Clement Greenberg encouraged young artists to “enjoy their diversity”—advice Jock Clutterbuck appreciated. As a student and teacher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in the sixties and early seventies, Clutterbuck’s visual alignment was tuned to a multicultural modernism acquired from teachers that included the Australian sculptor Lenton Parr, the émigré Lithuanians Vincas Jomantas and Teisutis Zikaras, the uncompromising Irish printmaker Tate Adams, and the charismatic Italian George Baldessin. While Clutterbuck belongs to the generation who made their mark during these watershed years—a time when provincialism and internationalism were hotly debated—he believed art’s lineage was an open field and subsequently carved a path towards the mystical while maintaining a deep connection to the Australian landscape.

Born in the Wimmera town of Edenhope in 1945, Clutterbuck grew up on an isolated farm surrounded by vast plains, boundary fences, patches of scrub, and the wide horizon. The relationship between earth and sky was pivotal to his understanding of surface and distance, and when he flew in a light aircraft over the family farm, he made a topographical mental map which he used when exploring the terrain on foot. Alert to how things moved, passed, and disappeared, like thunder rumbling over paddocks or heavy rain that etched the soil, Clutterbuck constructed a psychological geography that has continued to inform his unique visual language.

When Clutterbuck descended the limestone caves at Naracoorte, just over the South Australian border, he found the outside world tipped upside down, depth flattened and folded like the pictorial space in a Persian miniature, and the tension between above and below mesmerising. Back on the farm he dug a cave to investigate these immersive dimensional and spatial qualities further. Such intense physical and psychological relationships with natural phenomena induced a sacred respect for the land, and a 1966 etching, Head of an Explorer, and his 1980 sculpture, Caves of Wiswas, reference these childhood memories.

At RMIT Clutterbuck was drawn to the quietly spoken and introspective sculptor Vincas Jomantas whose meticulous, assured approach to materials and technique matched Jock’s precisionist nature. A remarkably sophisticated sculpture from this period, Figure, 1966, shows the influence of Constantin Brancusi, whose pedestal-like sculptures also informed Clutterbuck’s future work, while certain aesthetic parallels in his early etchings align with the Italian Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi.

Clutterbuck’s virtuosity in printmaking was noticed by Tate Adams who invited him to hold the first exhibition at Adams’ newly established Crossley Gallery, Melbourne, in 1966. With the establishment of the Print Council of Australia, Adams significantly elevated the medium of print and contributed to the printmaking revival of the late sixties and seventies. Patrick McCaughey recounts in his 2003 memoir The Bright Shapes and the True Names how Tate Adams expected a high standard of technical expertise, artistic inspiration, and originality. Adams held John Brack, Fred Williams, and John Olsen as pre-eminent in this field. By offering Clutterbuck a solo exhibition, Adams placed him within this elite fold. Adams’ connection with contemporary Japanese printmakers, including the woodblock master Shiko Munakata and Hideo Hagiwara, was also important for Clutterbuck. Printmaking helped Jock resolve his sculptural ideas with each medium exerting a formal impact on the other, such as transferring the flat linearism of the print to his three-dimensional black cast iron or bronze calligraphic sculptures.

Clutterbuck also benefited from Lenton Parr’s guidance: Parr had spent years in postwar England as an assistant to Henry Moore and brought the art of welded steel to Melbourne. When Parr left RMIT to head the National Gallery Art School, now the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), he appointed Clutterbuck to the VCA’s sculpture department in 1974. He also advised Jock that an appropriate art practice should involve a well conducted self-enquiry, something Clutterbuck had already developed on the Edenhope farm.

From 1973, Jock extended this through theosophical enquiries and study of Eastern spiritual philosophies, such as Tantric art and the sacred cosmology of Buddhist and Islamic teachings. His awareness that the co-founder and first director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hilla von Rebay, collected works by artists that “spoke the language of eternity”—in other words, art charged with the spiritual and mythical—reaffirmed Jock’s symbolic direction and iconography. His profound interest in Eastern spiritualism and its sense of immutability often set him apart from contemporary hard-edged steel abstractionists such as Inge King, David Wilson, and Ron Robertson-Swann; though several RMIT colleagues like Baldessin, who tragically died in 1978, had been obsessed with Mary Magdalene, and Roger Kemp was fascinated with crucifixions. Modernists who had followed a spiritual trail included the reclusive, peripatetic Asianist, Ian Fairweather and New Zealand’s Colin McCahon, both of whom Clutterbuck admired.

Myths are timeless communal instruments that tilt at reality, shifting time and forming a spiritual synthesis with the present. Clutterbuck has integrated this fusion of ancient and modern into his work. His own path from the bush to the Byzantine has produced an extraordinary body of prints, drawings, and sculptures that are intuitively composed and relate to the ontological and sensorial faculties of movement / hearing / sight and sound. Indeed, a resurgent interest among young artists, such as experimental groups like Liquid Architecture’s noise-listening-sonic initiatives, incorporate such faculty-orientation of deep listening and acute feeling. Recently Jock said of his practice: “The silent world of possibilities and archetypes is my preoccupation. Out of this zone we are able to bring back something, to give it form and have it stand in the world and give it a name, but the essential power in the work is always beyond words and has always worked its effect on us before we notice it.”

Transforming metal is a serious alchemic preoccupation for Clutterbuck. He has always built his own backyard foundries, pouring aluminium, bronze, and cast iron into lost wax moulds or polystyrene templates. Credited with establishing the VCA’s foundry in 1978, he expanded the sculpture department where he taught from 1974-2000 from a school of welders to one for cast metal sculptors, providing hands-on access to a method and medium that has its origins in antiquity.

Having moved quietly through the “noise and haste” of the 1970s and the postmodernist complexities of the eighties and nineties into the eclectic twenty-first century, Clutterbuck has maintained an aesthetic integrity and a highly productive art practice. His emblematic manifestations spring from an informed understanding of nature, antiquity, and a highly developed sense of intangible forces. Out of this he explores the spatial, esoteric, and material world of the imagination, distilling the essence of form and phenomena—fire, clouds, cascading waterfalls, stalagmites, calligraphic fragments held within Euclidean cartouche-like frames, and polished orbs that balance on geometric pedestals like exquisite ziggurats.

Jock Clutterbuck’s exhibition of new prints and sculptures at the Australian Galleries, Collingwood, in May, celebrates his established position and his distinctive, luminous art. It will also speak to younger generations preoccupied with modern mythologies, sense perception, and the human spirit.

Exhibition
Jock Clutterbuck
6 May – 24 May 2025
Australian Galleries, Melbourne

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.
Images courtesy of the artist and Australian Galleries, Melbourne