Clutch Gallery is both a challenge and a joy. With just 25 square inches to curate, Clutch can at times feel incredibly restrictive and a little impossible. But throw a few people together. Read a book, specifically Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, and discuss. Walking soon becomes more than just your left foot following your right and maps suddenly turn in on themselves to reveal ever stranger, more complex realms. By virtue of Clutch’s inherent mobility, those people, tasked with curating such a tiny space, decide the thread that connects Clutch, walking, and mapping is the idea of community. Because of Clutch’s transitory nature we wanted to find a way to root the diverse backgrounds of our class. We wanted to form connections between ourselves and with others in an effort to cultivate a new community where we all belonged. And so, we terraformed Clutch. To terraform, in the science fiction sense, is to take a previously uninhabitable space and to retrofit the space to be capable of sustaining human life. The spatial limitations of clutch can then be infinitely expanded by using the conceptual mapping terraforming provides. The slash between terra and form becomes very important in this sense. Terra, meaning earth and all of its flora, and form-- to create things, to give shape, or to have a specific character. Each work of art in the gallery is an index of the artists’ relationship to their own terra, and is manifested in a miniature physical form. Each work of art is plantable, as in, you can touch each piece and place it in the ground of the gallery garden. The participatory nature allows you to form a connection, and ultimately, a community with the works, artists, docents of clutch, and others who have handled the pieces before you. So please, give yourself a few moments to kindle a relationship and help Terra/Form grow.
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