Andrew Clapham
(b. 1992, Deniliquin, New South Wales. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Artist and designer Andrew Clapham works across printmaking, branding, illustration and print design. Printmaking is at the core of his multidisciplinary practice, which merges traditional and contemporary techniques and often harnesses manual, craft-centred processes. Influenced by the visual languages of activism and politics, Clapham’s work is underpinned by his deep knowledge of printmaking’s history and methods across commercial and artistic traditions.

For Melbourne Now, Clapham has been commissioned to create a new screenprint that draws upon his ongoing research into how manufactured landscapes and ever-accelerating change impact the natural world. Engaging with the aesthetics of modernist abstraction, he combines markers of minimalism and constructivism with visual cues taken from city life, including industrial iconography, hazard signage and experimental typography.

Here, Clapham turns his gaze to the urban geography of Melbourne’s west, where he prints all his work at Sunshine Print Artspace, overlaying photographic imagery with graphic shapes rendered in his trademark cobalt/cerulean blue ink. This sublime colour, often chosen to evoke sea and sky, is used to create systematic, grid-like patterns, suggesting the uneasy collision of nature and culture. Drawing upon printmaking’s legacies in both advertising and art-making, Clapham presents a subtle critique of urban construction degrading the Australian environment.

Clapham’s work has been exhibited across Australia, recently appearing in Sydney Contemporary 11 at Carriageworks (2021), RMIT Print Exchange at RMIT School of Art Gallery (2020) and BSide at BLINDSIDE (2020). He has developed large-scale public artworks for the City of Melbourne, Merri-bek Council and Stonnington Council, and has taken part in collaborative design projects with Studio Ongarato and Negative Press. Clapham holds a Masters of Communication and Design and a Bachelor of Fine Art (Printmaking) from RMIT University, where he currently teaches. He is also the founder of AMCD Studio, where he produces communication and graphic design projects for various private and public institutions.