Claire Barclay

CLAIRE BARCLAY’s sculptural installations use craft and industrial processes, composing precious and everyday materials into poetic and menacing installations. She views each exhibition as a ‘pause’ in an ongoing project: objects are grouped and re-grouped from one installation to the next, refining and adding to a growing vocabulary of forms. 'Barclay uses traditional craft materials such as wood, clay and wool in a traditional way but combines these elements to create powerful works. Often balanced around wooden or metal frames she explores the idea of ‘thinking and making’ through the construction of pots, screen printed cloth, weaving, basketry and other processes. The installations themselves move beyond the innocuous connotations of these acts and arrest the viewer with a quiet sense of unease.’ (Kirsteen Macdonald)

- Gained an MA at Glasgow School of Art
- Represented Scotland in the Venice Biennale in 2003
- Her sculptural pieces should be treated as a whole, but could exist separately
- Interested in the reduncy of museum objects and their ambigious qualities
- Began by creating found object installations- often the found objects would infer the reference, i.e. broken pottery would allude to domestic violence
- Barclay now uses only self-created objects in her installations- believes that by working with the materials one gains a greater knowledge of the object's properties and its creative scope
- However, she has to hire an engineering company when wanting to work with aluminium- therefore the model drawings are very much a collaborative piece
- Barclay's work is very interested in space- often encloses a section of the gallery, using 'barriers of space', to repel the visiter
- She also constructs the sculptured form in the gallery so there is a strong relationship to space
- Some works portray a fragility, which contrasts to the sharp edged forms that have a 'sexualised quality'
- Recently Barclay has incorporated fabric, as she believes by incorporating representational imagery, a psychological dimension is added to the work
- Her drawings do not sit within the installations and are often exhibited in the exhibition's corridors
- Her silk- screen prints often show knot designs, which draw attention to the tightness of space within her work
- The sculptured forms have a seemingly functional appearance, though for different reasons they could never be used for that purpose, i.e- chair legs are different lengths, the bed is unstable etc.
- Barclay constructed the framework of a dining table to mirror the gallery's historical decor in that section of the exhibition- alluded to greed and vanity
- A silk screen of intestines and stomachs was thrown over some of the beams in the dining table structure- from far the design looked floral
- Barclay's Bristol project rejected the viewer from the space by confronting the viewer's entrance with heavy wooden planks
- She also created some smaller sculptural pieces of Bristol's landmark municipal buildings, which dominate the skyline
- Barclay says her work negotiates with space, it does not interact or engulf space- it is more detached
- Her sculptural forms recently have a precarious quality, of balancing or pulling, which adds tension to the work