Clive practices architecture and art, in particular mixed media and monotype printmaking. He holds professional architectural design undergraduate and graduate degrees from Portsmouth Polytechnic, UK, and a Master of Philosophy in Architectural History and Theory from Cambridge University (Thesis: "The Place of Mimesis in Architectural Representation," Supervisor: Dalibor Vesely, 1988). Clive has taught architecture since 1984 and was a full-time lecturer at Sheffield University for six years before moving to Portland State University in 1995 where he currently resides as a professor and director of the PSU School of Architecture. His primary areas of interest include the cultural meanings of architectural representation understood through the phenomenology of the human body, with particular reference to the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the revelatory capacity of metaphor in poetic work; and speculations in architectural design studio pedagogy. Publications include many journal articles and book chapters on the theory, history and pedagogy of architecture.

He has exhibited design work internationally, including three projects at the 1985 Venice Biennale as a founding partner of Ferenczi Design; and the prize-winning finalist project for the Grand Buildings Competition at the Royal Institute of British Architects, London, 1986. He has shown mixed media work in many public settings, such as the Northwest Biennial at the Tacoma Art Museum, Washington, in 2004. He has designed and built several works including the Christiane Millinger Oriental Rug Gallery in Portland, Oregon (with Michael Gibson, 2000), the Riverhouse, a private dwelling on the Columbia River in Cathlamet, Washington (with Louise Foster, 2002), and the Corpus, a workshop and studio in the backyard of his Portland, Oregon home (with Louise Foster, 2010). His current, ongoing project is an interpretive study of the involuntary predicament of being human, incorporating a series of monotypes, mixed media drawings, maquettes and full-scale thematic structures directly engaging the human body, collectively gathered under the working title: Cycles and Horizons: Re-membering the Daughters of Mnemosyne.
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Clive is also a printmaker and creator of full-scale festival structures. He is represented by the gallerist Laura Vincent in Portland, Oregon. Since 2021 he has had 3 solo shows of his collages and monotype prints in Portland; a solo show at Sacripante Gallery in Rome, Italy in May 2023; and another at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, VA, February through May 2024. He has exhibited work in over 35 group shows in multiple US states and overseas nations, including England, Scotland, France, Poland, Belgium, Slovenia, Estonia, Norway, Spain and Italy. In April 2022 he curated the international exhibition titled Corporeal Gestures in Portland that included over 100 collages by more than 100 artists from 22 countries. He designed and published the catalogue of all the work in this show. In June 2022 he published his first monograph covering work from the previous 3 years titled Gestures from a Body at Work: Unsuccessful Attempts at Grasping Eternity (both books are available from Lulu.com).