Claire Barclay


Claire Barclay is a Scottish artist. Her artistic practice uses a number of traditional mediums that include installation, sculpture and printmaking, but it also expands to encapsulate a diverse array of craft techniques. Central to her practice is a sustained exploration of materials and space.
"While there is always a concept behind the work its actual form comes out of the 'play' with materials and my response to them"

Early life and education

Claire Barclay received a Master of Fine Arts from the Glasgow School of Art, where she focused on environmental art. She graduated in 1993 with an MA.

Career

Barclay's first solo exhibition was at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow in 1994. In 2003, Barclay represented Scotland in the Venice Biennale. Her work was the focus of a solo exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2004. In 2009 she had a solo exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, which documented significant works created by Barclay over the previous 12 years, alongside newly-commissioned installations. In 2017 she showed new large scale sculptural work at Tramway Gallery in Glasgow, and the work made here amongst others were reworked and adapted at Mission Gallery, Swansea, in 2018

Themes

Situated within realms of the domestic, Barclay's work juxtaposes the reified space of the gallery with that of the everyday. The objects present within her installations allude to dichotomies between function and dysfunction; subsequently, this imbues them with qualities of both the familiar and strange, simultaneously imparting them with an elusory nature.

Style

Barclay creates large-scale installations, often made in situ and in response to the spaces in which they are shown. Her practice is also deeply rooted in process and craftsmanship; accordingly, her installations include an array of materials that oscillate between those associated with mechanization and those associated with the domestic: steel, cast-concrete, machined aluminium, rubber, brass mesh, ceramic, leather, canvas and printed fabric. These dualities further position her artistic process between the handcrafted and industrially produced, as well as the natural and man-made.

Selected exhibitions