Claire Barclay led a talk at Edinburgh College of Art exploring the theme of 'context' in relation to her practice and the ways in which her work is installed in galleries and exhibition spaces.
Claire is a Scottish artist, living and working in Glasgow. Her practice is grounded, quite literally, in the realm of installation- both large and small scale-exploring formal and conceptual concerns through an ongoing fascination with historical and anthropological artifacts. Claire's sculptural practice enables Claire to be tactile, working with materials from turned wood to machined brass and fabric suggesting a concern for craftsmanship whether through the hand-woven or mechanically produced.
Alongside her sculptural practice, Claire, more recently, has introduced printmaking to her practice- again with a link back to the hand, skill and materiality-the artist's printmaking works in harmony with the formal principles that characterise her sculptural installations, with prints hovering between the geometric and organic.
Claire discussed context as being both the space in which she displays her work, in terms of location, and as being an important characteristic in the research and development of her practice. Claire, first discussed her most recent exhibition at the Tramway in Glasgow, entitled 'Yield Work'. Unusually for Barclay, the expansive gallery space at Tramway allowed her to make her work in-situ, incorporating structural elements of the space into her installations, allowing the foreign and existing structures to coalesce transforming the stark, industrial looking space into an organised, yet organic playground for forms to emerge and respond to the qualities of one another.
"Eccentric processes often come out of a sculptural need"
Barclay went on to discuss her work retrospectively, tracing the theme of context through her installations at Hospitalfield, Whitechapel and the Huntarian amongst others. Despite the varying environments each of the locations provided for Barclay to install her work (from stately homes, city-centre galleries and the outdoor) she responds to ideas of proximity and the close-up encounter; her sculptural works creating transitional zones between public and private space resolved in accordance with the site in which they are exhibited.
Barclay described her works as structures that become a "second skin" to their place. This statement couldn't be more apt as her works (both sculpture and print) are on display as part of 'Strange Foreign Bodies' exhibition at the Huntarian Art Gallery in Glasgow. The exhibition accompanies a major survey into the anatomy of the Modern Museum and William Hunter. Claire responds to Hunter's collection of casts and engravings of the female body and the 'gravid uterus'.
