Jake Clark’s grandfather’s name was Harold, but everyone called him Hershey – like the American chocolate bar. Harold loved those chocolates. As a kid, Clark would sit around sketching the Hershey’s logo and its chocolate wrappers. Or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Butterfingers candy bars. He spent hours drawing basketball players like Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan, and the uniforms and logos of his favourite NBA teams.

He visited the US often, drank in its giant billboards, flashing neon signage and supermarket aisles packed with shiny consumer branding. He was enthralled with American culture and its iconography. And for as long as he’s made ceramics, he’s referenced American restaurants, fast food brands and pop culture symbols.

A giant pink pot painted with the looping signage of the Beverly Hills Hotel. A glossy ashtray adorned with Wendy’s red-haired mascot. In-N-Out. The Chateau Marmont. Mountain Dew. They all made early appearances on Clark’s clay vessels, and no doubt helped win the attention of American gallerists.

In 2020, Clark had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York. Aspen and Miami followed. In 2021, he sent a collection off to Brussels for his first European show. The Melbourne-born, New York-based artist has been in back-to-back exhibitions in the US, Europe and Asia ever since.

But Clark’s latest exhibition is unlike all the others.

Since 2019, New York’s Rockefeller Center has partnered with the Art Production Fund, a non-profit that commissions major public art projects, for a series of installations at the midtown Manhattan landmark. Called Art in Focus, the quarterly event features work by contemporary artists whose practices are inspired by New York City. Jake Clark is the first Australian to be selected for the program.

A public commission at Rockefeller Center nearly always brings monumental exposure for the artist. But the holiday slot is indisputably prime-time, as an estimated eight million people make the journey to view a scene immortalised in countless Hollywood films: the colossal, light-spangled Christmas tree; below it, the iconic ice-skating rink filled with graceful pros and inept but giddy first-timers as the eight-ton, hulking gold Prometheus statue looks on.

“The holidays bring an energy and an increase in audience to Rockefeller Center that is unmatched,” says Casey Fremont, the executive director of the Art Production Fund. “Participation in public art, especially the diverse audience Rockefeller Center attracts, brings awareness of the artist and their work at an incomparable scale.”

Fremont had seen Clark’s signature pop-culture pots at an East Hampton exhibition over the American summer. With his vast catalogue of New York-centric works, and a talent for making art that’s fun and instantly accessible, he was a natural fit for Art in Focus.

There is a deliberately imperfect quality to Clark’s handmade earthenware – part folksy, part slick, part classical, part pop-art. Clark is as influenced by David Hockney and Keith Haring as the amphorae inscribed with stories of daily life in ancient Greece.

“I’m leaving a small memory of a place on these vessels,” he says. He imagines them as future artefacts. The pots are oversized, high-gloss and brightly coloured – impossible to miss in the elegant vitrines on 45 Rockefeller Plaza’s ground floor.

There’s a pot dedicated to Radio City Music Hall, with a reflective silver lustre and the theatre’s iconic red-and-yellow signage. A tall, slim vase, in robin-egg blue, is Clark’s ode to Tiffany & Co, with a sparkling diamond pendant painted around its body.

There are tributes to New York’s legendary pretzel carts and Sabrett hot dogs, alongside FAO Schwarz and Le Rock. One next to the other, at different heights on timber plinths, the display feels like an allusion to Manhattan and its skyscrapers.

On the level below Rockefeller Center’s famous ice rink, two-metre-high images of Clark’s pots are the stars of an almost 40-metre-long mural.

Clark moved to New York with his wife and daughter in 2022 after several Covid-induced delays. His daughter, now almost four, has an American accent and his son was born there earlier this year. The city, with its electric energy and superlative art scene, suits him. And Clark, with his hustle and freight-train-speed chat, suits it right back.

Even though Clark had a solid international following before he moved, the relocation has been fruitful. His pieces are becoming bolder and more complex. New forms have entered his repertoire. Exhibitions and commissions have multiplied, as have his collectors. A snowballing group of tastemakers covets his work, from art world bosses and Hollywood stars to top chefs and restaurateurs.

But Clark is much more interested in chatting about his commute, or the off-leash benefits of his new neighbourhood, than influential collectors or celebrity fans.

“I really don’t think about it too much. I just genuinely love going into my studio and being able to work and play music. Sometimes I think I need to stop and smell the roses a little bit more … But I’m honestly so happy that I just get to go into my studio and make art,” he says. “When I think about all the people that I’m making the work for – if I think about it too much, it feels like pressure.”

Clark is in his Brooklyn studio six or seven days a week. It’s an old printing factory on the border of Park Slope and Gowanus, with a red awning adorned with exactly the kind of block-letter signage Clark would reproduce in clay. Inside, the studio is virtually a replica of the one he had in Melbourne, except “half the size, and double the money”.

Imagine a large white rectangular space, with shelves running up and down the longest two walls. Sometimes they’re lined with grey, clay vessels ready for painting, other times loaded with hyper-coloured, post-kiln sculptures ready to be shipped to their destination. Right now, the shelves are empty as Clark begins work on a new commission. Sportswear brand Eric Emanuel has ordered a six-metre-long installation of wonky giant trophies for its new Soho store.

“It took a while for me to get comfortable over here,” Clark says. “Even though the clay type that I found was exactly the same as what I was using in Australia, it’s still very different because it comes from the earth in America.”

“Everyone said, ‘Wait till you get here – you’ve got every [paint] colour option’. And I started using them, and I was like, this is literally the shittest thing I’ve ever seen,” he says, laughing. “I kind of expected I could just get here and set up my studio and keep going as if I’d never been anywhere else. It was a bit of a shock.”

He quickly reverted to his Australian paints and underglazes, and every few months he gets a shipment from the two suppliers he’d always used back home. He’s even set up his kiln to replicate his Australian configuration (Celsius setting included), despite objections. When he told the kiln installers the temperature he usually fires to, they were bewildered. “That’s what we do to [bake] a biscuit”, Clark says they told him.

As it was in his Melbourne studio, there’s hip-hop on the speakers. But recently, there’s also been a lot of Paul Kelly and the Black Sorrows. Prince, his black standard poodle, is a constant presence.

Clark builds a handful of dioramic ashtrays for all his shows. The ashtrays typically resemble miniature tennis courts or Hockney-esque swimming pools, but for Art in Focus, he made just one. This is an artist whose obsessions are reflected in pretty much every piece he makes, but Clark says that the ashtray, and a giant snow globe he made for the show, are his most personal pieces to date.

“The pots are places that I love, but I feel like the ashtray and the snow globe are zoomed-in, zoomed-out versions of my memories of seeing Rockefeller at Christmas time,” he says. “The other day we went ice skating at the centre. It was chaos – people everywhere, almost bumping into each other. Very, very crowded. The ashtray is super crowded. It’s my childhood memory of that experience.”

The piece is installed in the lobby of 30 Rock, arguably Rockefeller Center’s most famous address. At half a metre, it’s the biggest ashtray Clark’s ever built, and depicts a whimsical scene of Ludwig Bemelmans-style figures skating at the ice rink.

“I really do love those [Bemelmans] characters,” he says, referring to the American author and illustrator who created Madeline. “His drawings have so much movement, and that’s what I tried to re-create here. The people really do look like they’re swinging around each other. It’s almost like there’s music going, and they’re all just dancing around the ice-skating rink.”

Prince also makes a long-awaited appearance in the sculpture, in a perfectly rendered ceramic miniature that looks like it’s been accidentally let off the leash and is about to jump the fence.

30 Rock: home to Saturday Night Live, Liz Lemon and now Prince Clark.

Jake Clark’s Art in Focus installation is on view at Rockefeller Center in New York until January 31, 2025.

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