I have on my table a battered blue hardback, picked up in the early 1980s in Charing Cross Road. Cloud Studies, by Arthur W. Clayden, was published by John Murray in 1905. It was by no means the first classification of cloud types, but was pioneering in its way, and beneath the surface calm of the writing you can detect an intrigue, an apprehension that the writer is leading you into novel territory. The existing scheme of cloud names, proposed by Luke Howard in 1803, had done excellent service argues Clayden, but “attention is now being given to much smaller details and much more minute differences of form, and our vocabulary must be amplified”. The manifesto is carried in a single breath-taking sentence: “There is always a danger that the use of any system of names based on types shall lead to the neglect of everything not typical”.
This is profound, and reaches out from its context as a free-standing maxim, a fundamental truth. When I first read it, I wanted to do something with it, and settled on making a boxed edition of the text punched out on rolls of Dymotape, with the title – modified from Clayden’s – Cloud Study. I found working on this engaged me in unexpected ways: clicking round the ratchet wheel of the letter selector, and squeezing the grip of the embossing lever, one letter at a time, broke the sense down into its component parts, into something decelerated from the normal velocity of reading and understanding. On top of this, at the time I worked mostly with an Adana tabletop letterpress machine, with its infinite allowance for remedy. With a Dymo label printer, one misalignment of the alphabetical wheel, one mistimed pull of the lever, resulted in a reel of tape being binned.
I liked also the extra work involved for the reader: taking the tape out of its box and unravelling it, stretching it out at arms’ length and reading the long single line as though scanning the horizon. There was a further unplanned outcome, that the letters of the text, blistered in white from their extrusion from the black vinyl, had themselves a filmy, cloudy, diffusion.
Later there were other versions: a 5×5 checkerboard grid of alternate blue and white button badges, one word per badge, a skyscape of stylised cumulus fractus. This was Cloud Study 2, shown in 1995 at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, in nonnonstop, a show of printed work and source material produced by my friend Colin Sackett and myself. Then there was a travelling show of artists’ axioms, titled Standing on Trifles and curated by Les Buckingham for Southampton City Art Gallery, which displayed the text not once but twice, it being selected by both Colin Sackett and by me.
Several revisitations of Clayden, then, over the years. The text endures for its generous sense of inclusivity, for spelling out the essential rule that nothing should be passed over because it doesn’t fit expectation. At the time I made Cloud Study, the rightness of this seemed evident in existing givens: the tenets of evolution, for example, where it is the non-typical that triggers development and modification, what we would call progress. These days I think of it more as a driver: examples that spring to mind include fuzzy logic; gender diversity; the championing of marginal edgelands; and cross-over trends in everything from music through cookery to car design. Clayden’s text stands as a corrective to the dominance of the status quo.
*
Colin Sackett: book design & publishing http://www.colinsackett.co.uk
A memorial plaque to Arthur W. Clayden, who was Principal of the Royal Albert Memorial College, can be found on the wall of what is now the Phoenix Arts Centre, close to Exeter public library.