André S Clements

14/02/2026

Built the thing I've been threatening to build for years — a proper digital home for Life Drawing Randburg. Session archive, artwork gallery, a claim system so artists and models can build their profiles through participation, attendance tracking. Strava for artistry, basically.

Ten-minute brief to an AI collaborator before people arrived for the session. Six hours later: working app, bespoke architecture, very little bloat. The future is here, just not evenly distributed — but it does seem more distributed than before.

I get a sense of vertigo from this technology. Also a sense of something like gardening.

Beta soon, if other commitments allow. Right now: parkrun, then the next lifedrawing session.

I had long wanted to build a content management system to hold the snapshots of drawing I take during our life drawing sessions. Been threatening to do so for years, but where to find the time? — even using off-the-shelf solutions would take more time than I really have, or that my particular blen...

25/01/2026

Torsos | 2026
Charcoal dust (from discarded drawings), charcoal, matte graphite, carbon-ink fountain pen (Japanese). A2 Hahnemühle sketchbook page, 42 × 30 cm.
Resolution is weighted: quiet zones hold the page open while ink-dense incident pulls focus. Text hovers at the edge of legibility—seen and read at once.

Some readings only appear after you stop trying to find them.

20/01/2026

20/01/2026

’Tis all snakes and ladders, isn’t it?, 96 x 96 cm.

The Conceptual Framework: The Temporal Loop
This work operates as a temporal mirror: a nocturnal landscape where any attempt to look into the future is met by the future looking back. At the centre sits a luminous sphere—at once biological eye, protective bubble, and planetary lens—returning the viewer’s gaze with calm insistence.

Above, the skull holds the simplest fact in the composition: the inevitable fallibility behind every move, every climb, every detour.

The Scaffolding: Tesseract and Multipartiality
Beneath the misted surface, an architecture asserts an orthographic projection of a tesseract (hypercube). This subtle grid alludes to multiplicities of dimension: a world with extra faces—nothing ever fits only a single perspective.

In this space, contradictions coexist: luck and order, innocence and consequence, spirit and packaging, ascent and descent.

The Alice-as-Infanta and the Ghost Sitter
In the lower register, a small diplomatic meeting unfolds between two avatars of structured girlhood. Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita (caught inside etiquette and attention) becomes Carroll’s Alice, attended by a servant lady with a bubble-wrap flower in her hair. Together they might represent the subject of the game: the self as both observed and mover.

At the lower right, a sitter appears at the edge of the field—suggested through scratches, half-forms, and the grid’s drift into ground tone.

HEXACO Metrics and the Diagnostic Halo
Around the sphere, the perimeter is ringed by HEXACO traits, rendered as a pseudo-Greek set of tokens (Σ, Λ, X, C, H, O). This deliberate “Big Six” topology gestures toward what the dominant “Big Five” tends to omit: Honesty–Humility.

Honesty–Humility (H) sits in the earth register, as foundation rather than ornament.

Plastic on the Moon
The surface logic shifts between the “sacred” (mist, sentinel geometry) and the disposable (bubble-wrap texture, synthetic colour, imprint, residue). This is plastic on the moon: even our most esoteric pursuits arrive mediated—contaminated, handled by systems, metrics, materials.

Conclusion
’Tis all snakes and ladders, isn’t it? treats itself as a lived diagram: a gameboard where character, chance, and mortality remain in continuous negotiation. The viewer stands inside a system that watches back—shadowed, haunted, and playful.

R 3,333.33

See it at Moon, opening at Trent Gallery 18:00 2026-01-23

10/10/2025

Elana’s opening talk at lifescape() unfolds as an articulation of vulnerability as art’s living ground. Speaking as both artist’s model and witness, she traces the act of posing as a radical form of trust — a willingness to be seen without controlling how one is interpreted. Her reflections mirror the exhibition’s non-domination ethos: presence without hierarchy, meaning allowed to emerge rather than imposed. By likening the model to a prism refracting perception, she turns visibility itself into collaboration — the shared risk of being and observing. Her words complete the curatorial field of lifescape(): a space where embodiment, attention, and surrender become coequal gestures in the art of living:

So you're probably wondering what inspires a person to show up as an artist's model?

I believe my motivations may not be that different from others, although my articulation may be unexpected.

Answering this question caused me to ask myself what is most important to me.

I think the common perception is an artist's model has a desire to be seen. But this is far more nuanced and complex than you may realise. Please humour me and consider a prism and the analogy of the model as the prism. What refractions, what facets are reflected, ultimately I have no control of. And this speaks to me of the concepts of non dominance and non attachment, principles so intrinsic to André's impeccable facilitation process. As a model, I too can have no attachment to how I am witnessed or the art that is created as a result. It's a radical act of surrender, not knowing what the witnesses will see and choose to capture or how I will be immortalised.

It is said that when we die all that remains of us are the stories that others tell of us, and for the artist perhaps the art that will endure. But what of living? How do we know we are truly alive? I believe one of the most life affirming affirmations we can receive is to be witnessed by another.

Modelling for others is a way to affirm my existence. It's also radical act of defiance for those of us who are aware of our imperfections and yet choose to be seen in a society so obsessed with physical homogeneity. It's story telling through our very physicality yet without imposition of narrative.

And that feels a lot to me like art.

As the artist creates a work and leaves their canvas open for interpretation by the witness, so the model stands before the artist waiting to be interpreted too.

But why art? My answer to this question informs so much of my philosophy to life and definitely why I am standing here today.

I don't believe the answer to this question lies in any logical explanation that can be answered by the rational mind.

I can't explain to you why I have walked around a corner in a museum filled by the works of masters and as I was about to leave, bumped into an incomplete sepia sketch which caused me to burst into tears.

I discovered later this was a work of the master Da Vinci.

Why does the visceral experience of art change the way we see the world, disrupt society or make our souls sing?

Why art? Because art. For me I do not need any other answer. Whilst my technical skill may be personally limited, I believe my heart and soul has been afflicted by the same muses who afflict an artist. And these muses have taught me that life itself is art in motion, and how we choose to move and what we notice is so important too.

Why art? Much like the question why do we love? Could we do things any other way? And why have I chosen to model? Because ...art.

Elana’s opening talk at lifescape() unfolds as an articulation of vulnerability as art’s living ground. Speaking as both artist’s model and witness, she trac...

30/09/2025

Anqa (1/1, 2025)
R 3,333.33
Archival pigment print. Parametric authorship — layered computational interventions with an original photograph.
Part of the lifescape() exhibition at Stokvel Gallery, 4 & 5 Oct 2025

23/08/2025

A 1st draft of
'The Fourth Dimension is Ex*****on
A Formalisation of Parametric Authorship via the Hyperstrate,
Semiological Ground,
and Systemic Implications':
a thesis concept that via Computational Science & Engineering, is rooted in Object-Oriented Ontology, and dialogues with Aesthetics, Conceptual Art, and Creative Literature.

https://github.com/AndreClements/README/blob/main/projects/theses/parametric_authorship.md