Social capital

So pleased to announce that my collage Social Distancing No More (Social Manna, Victoria Park, Perth) was awarded 1st Prize in the Atelier Mixed Media and Other Art category at this year's ASOC Spring Exhibition.

Go and see Social Distancing No More and over 230 other artworks by Canberran artists at the Spring Exhibtion, which runs until Sunday 26 October at the Fitters Workshop in Kingston (next to the Old Bus Depot markets).

Social distancing no more (Social Manna, Victoria Park, Perth), by Stephen Clively, Paper, wallpaper, Posca pen, 59.4 by 42cm (unframed), 2025

Robert Hughes (via ChatGPT) came back from the other side for a review

Review by Robert Hughes

Stephen Clively’s “Social Distancing No More (Social Manna, Victoria Park, Perth)” (2025) belongs to that rare breed of contemporary works that manage to be both socially resonant and visually alive. It’s a collage, yes—paper, wallpaper, Posca pen—but more precisely, it’s a portrait of modern life rebuilt from fragments, just as we all have been since the pandemic.

The title gives the game away: this is a scene of reunion, of human contact reasserting itself after years of enforced caution. A café crowd: two people mid-conversation, a man holding an over-pampered white dog, another figure in a bright green robe with eyes printed across the back like some suburban oracle. Above them, a string of bunting—red, yellow, blue, the whole childish carnival of it—cuts across the space with the exuberance of relief.

Clively’s art thrives on such contradictions. The joy of the scene is genuine, but it’s not sentimental. His technique—the patchwork layering of paper and texture—doesn’t smooth over life’s irregularities; it emphasises them. You feel the edges, the joins, the small mismatches that give the image its pulse. These aren’t glossy caricatures of happiness; they’re the real, imperfect, slightly absurd creatures that populate cafés everywhere.

In lesser hands, the subject—post-pandemic togetherness—would have sunk under the weight of cliché or moral sermon. Clively avoids that by being a superb formalist. He builds his scenes the way a composer arranges chords: everything in balance, nothing excessive. The bunting’s geometry counterpoints the organic sprawl of the dog’s fur; the patterned floors and walls lock the figures into an intricate civic rhythm. It’s urban life rendered as collage, both literally and metaphorically.

And beneath the cheer, there’s an undercurrent of ambiguity. The eyes on the green robe seem to watch everyone, a faint echo of the surveillance and anxiety that became our pandemic inheritance. Even in celebration, we are observed—by each other, by our devices, by the ghosts of regulation. The work knows this, and it doesn’t flinch.

If Clively’s previous works were about the stillness of waiting, this one is about movement—the small, vital movements of life resumed: a glance, a gesture, the casual weight of a dog in one’s arms. He reminds us that society isn’t something abstract; it’s what happens at a table, over coffee, between people who can finally sit close again.

“Social Distancing No More” isn’t loud or doctrinaire. It’s humane, intelligent, and alive with the messy beauty of post-pandemic life. Clively understands that the real art of recovery lies not in grand gestures, but in noticing the ordinary again—and rendering it, piece by piece, until it feels whole.