My very first experience of flow was as a young boy, watching an enourmous body of water endlessly re-arrange itself in waves of pattern, order and chaos around the migrant ship Toscana, as it traversed the Indian Ocean in 1956… (Domenico de Clario, 2004)
From the late sixties de Clario began to engage experientially with these ideas, via a practice that combined site-specific installations made entirely of found materials with performance.
In 1988 de Clario presented an exhibition titled Tabula Rasa at the Powell Street Gallery in Melbourne. This current exhibition, Random Science: Pattern, Order and Chaos, takes its title from the work that in 1988 was acquired from Tabula Rasa for the Holmes à Court Collection.
The motivating spirit that for over four decades has driven de Clario to collect and order random fragments of found materials is manifested in both the peculiar specificity of each collection and in the performance presented in the Gallery. The peformance consisted of the keyboard sound-translations of a number of poems found by chance in a Sydney street in 1996.
Through the presentation of these collections de Clario attempts to describe the shape of a life through the flow of its changes in motion and form, continuing to develop one of Australia’s most elusive and poetic bodies of work.
