Lily Clark

ROSANNA ROBERTSON: Water is the focus of your work – it’s your material – and so, I wondered if you grew up on the water? 

LILY CLARK: I think my fascination with water came from learning the history of LA – which is such a dry, almost waterless place that it has to import its water from 400 miles away – and so it was the infrastructure that I grew up around that initially got me thinking about water as a material. Also, I grew up near the Silver Lake reservoir, which is a fairly large body of water with a walking path around it, and it’s somewhere you can witness how water reacts to various weather conditions, how the wind comes in contact with it, how the weather patterns are reflected in its mirrored surface. 

The connection between the city of Los Angeles and the Sierra Mountains has also been a long-standing interest of mine. The Sierras provide the city with its drinking water, and in 2022-23, I lived in the eastern Sierras. It happened to be a super snowy year, and so we would shovel 10 feet of snow every day, and it made it so visceral to me that this snow would eventually become drinking water for everyone living in the city.

RR: I was thinking, when looking at your work, about the irresistible nature of moving water, be it an ocean or a single droplet, you can’t help but be engrossed in it. 

LC: Definitely. I have a vivid memory of my dad showing me the phenomenon of a meniscus for the first time by filling a cup of water slowly. I was probably six years old, and I lost my mind. It seemed like a magic trick, and that really stuck with me. Working with water, you get a really deep understanding of the laws that govern it, and so it’s a never-ending challenge, a deep well of inspiration. 

RR: In every culture, water represents life, and I wondered if, for you, water is purely a material, or if there is an emotional or spiritual connection that you make with water? 

LC: I often reference this thinker-artist-inventor: a man called Viktor Schauberger. In fact, the show I’m working on at the moment is an homage, of sorts, to his work. He’s an interesting figure who studied these self-similar patterns, which repeat themselves in every aspect of the natural world. To me, that kind of gets at your question, the broader perspective on this medium. For me, it’s not just water – it relates to clouds, wood, the stars in the sky. It’s the reason that our planets are spherical, the way that babies form in-utero, and how our bones are shaped. It’s all tied into these principles of vortical motion. If you read Schauberger’s work, you see that, like Nikola Tesla, he was a proponent of implosive forces rather than explosive forces, using energy to draw something rather than using fire or explosion to create energy. His work sits on the edge of pseudo-science and actual science, and so I pick and choose from his writings, but his ideas have shaped a lot of my practice. 

RR: I was thinking about ecosystems when looking at your work – this sense of containment, where everything that is needed is there, nothing more, nothing less. 

LC: Yes, it’s a closed loop. That’s what I always say. Often, people don’t understand that each work is a self-contained mechanism, and I’m investigating ways for the cycle of water to function without the need for an external power source. But currently, perpetual motion is not possible – or not that we know of. There are some examples that get close, like Heron’s fountain, which uses capillary action to draw the water up. If it’s done right, it will work for many hours without any external power, but not permanently.