Lenka Clayton

Lenka Clayton (born 1977 Cornwall, England) is a British-American conceptual artist and educator based in Pittsburgh. Her work contemplates, exaggerates and defamiliarizes accepted rules and practices of everyday life, extending the ordinary to the poetic and absurd. Her work spans and expands upon many disciplines including film, video, performance, fibers, drawing and writing. Clayton has exhibited her art nationally and internationally.

Biography Lenka Clayton earned a Master of Arts in Documentary Direction from the National Film and Television School, and a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London.

Her materials are often culled from daily life and range from maps, letters, paper mail, clothing and stones to objects pulled from her son’s mouth. Her processes utilize unconventional systems and organizations, offering a world deconstructed, rearranged and newly envisioned.

Some exhibitions include the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, FRAC Le Plateau in Paris, Kunsthalle St. Gallen in Switzerland, Anthology Film Archives in New York City, and the Tehran International Documentary Festival in Iran.

She is an adjunct assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as of 2016.

7,000 stones (2009) 7,000 Stones was created during Clayton's tenure as the Theodore Randall International Chair at Alfred University. Works from Clayton's Artist Residency in Motherhood were exhibited at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 2012, in Complicated Labors, curated by Irene Lusztig & Natalie Loveless, at University of California Santa Cruz in 2014, and in State of the Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, in 2016.