By the 1950s Clough had turned her attention away from beachscapes towards the urban environment and themes of labour. The industrial landscape became a source of endless fascination for her, as Britain rebuilt and regenerated itself in the years following the war. She turned her gaze away from the shingle beaches of North Suffolk towards Thameside cranes, lorries on inner city building sites and workers in factories.

Chance encounters with discarded objects in builder’s yards or on construction sites now began to hold her attention. Configurations on a crumbling plaster wall or an arresting shape of an unidentified object outside a factory gate could produce surprising results. Wastelands and urban dereliction provided a series of new shapes, colours and textures and a catalogue of visual information with which to create her paintings. Clough made economical use of colour making it sing out from within the grids and meshes of her painted textures.

The New Art Centre, London
Private Collection, U.K.

Frances Spalding, Prunella Clough: regions unmapped, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2012, p. 131, pl. no. 84 (ill. col.)

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Prunella Clough, September – October 1960, no. 74 (Arts Council); touring to City Art Gallery, York, College of Art, Bournemouth, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries, Arts Council Gallery, Cambridge, Art Gallery, Blackburn, Art Gallery, Derby and Camden Art Centre, London, 2015