Land of Thorns is a compact yet potent woodcut that demonstrates Clarke’s command of the graphic medium. From 1962, the print emanates from a period when he studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and was conceptually exploring the expressive potential of relief printing to comment on environmental and social conditions. This work foreshadows the forced removals that happened in South Africa where Clarke was himself affected and moved from his home in Simonstown to Ocean View in 1972 under the Group Areas Act.

In Clarke’s work, landscapes are never neutral backdrops. They carry the memory of dispossession, labour, and ecological strain. Here, the harshness of the terrain can be read as an analogue for the tightening grip of apartheid legislation in the early 1960s, as well as for the psychological “thorniness” of living under such a regime. This work situates Black Modernism within broader questions of land, ownership, and extraction that remain central to contemporary discourse, particularly in debates around land restitution and environmental justice. The small scale of Land of Thorns is also meaningful, and echoes Clarke’s own lived experience. It invites close, almost devotional looking, mirroring the The Mourner’s link to iconography.