CLAIRE BARCLAY

Barclay is one of her generation’s foremost sculptors. Emerging from the Scottish art scene in the late nineties, her practice explores formal and conceptual concerns through both large and smaller scale installations. One of the key influences in her working practice, is an ongoing fascination with historical and anthropological artifacts. Barclay is drawn to the more ambiguous objects that spark a curiosity as to their uses and meanings. The objects in her work are unfamiliar yet suggestive of function through their forms and material characteristics, which we interpret in order to imagine how people might interact with them. Turned wood, rawhide, soft leather, machined brass and woven straw are some of the materials that coalesce as the precious and the everyday, the hand-woven and the mechanically produced, and are brought to the fore in Barclays’ practice. Each sculpted piece teeters somewhere on the brink between the figurative and the abstract, between the ambiguous and the referential.