Claire Barclay approaches her installation-based work with a rigorous and playful eye. Looking askance at things, she turns quotidian objects into something else—useless, without any obvious function, but imbued with an emotive complexity that allows for physical and psychological effects just when we least expect them. Often working with materials that have served human endeavor for centuries, she also interjects small, highly engineered objects to act as caesuras within environments that puzzle and delight. Barclay’s understated works can only be brought forth in a particular place, as objects come together in response to their surroundings. Because of this, and what might be thought of as her cultural anthropology of materials and place, the strength of the sensory experience can be overwhelming.
In RAWLESS, Barclay’s current installation at Cample Line in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, visitors move around and between strange forms, negotiating an awkward path that heightens awareness of the body and its relationship to other bodies and things. This acute physical awareness is accompanied by an awareness of another sort, one that triggers memories and emotions. The potency of Barclay’s objects emerges from their ambiguity, their condition, or status as items of curiosity that we can’t quite make sense of. Her deep interrogation of place balances engineered and handmade, industrial and agricultural, craft techniques and fine art practice, as well as domestic and workplace, to evoke a visceral response. By glancing across the surface of things with a material curiosity, Barclay gets under their skin.
Beth Williamson: You studied at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) from 1986, gaining a BA in Environmental Art and then a master’s in fine art. Did you realize the uniqueness of the Environmental Art course?
Claire Barclay: Probably not at the time. I started off painting, but early on, I began working sculpturally and creating environments. We were based in an old, semi-derelict girl’s high school and had access to a network of rooms that we could inhabit for weeks to experiment and make installations. I think that was where everything germinated. There was a sense that we were experiencing something special, but not that it was different to any other generation of students at GSA. After graduation, there was a realization that this new course had been a springboard for progressive ideas, one being that you stay within the city and through networks and initiatives, you make things happen within the city.
BW: Early on, you moved away from using found objects to making objects yourself, or commissioning them. Why was that important?
CB: A lot of my peers were interested performance- or installation-oriented work and using found objects with poignant associations. I associated with that and was influenced by people like Joseph Beuys in terms of the expanded associations and meanings that come with using a particular kind of found material. But I realized that those associations were very specific, and I wanted more ambiguity, so I started to make objects to use within my installations.
BW: How do you move from concept to an object?
CB: The concepts are a starting point and a continuum within my practice. With these recurring themes, you can see a thread leading right back to art school. Often, I’m working with a given situation when asked to make an exhibition. By connecting with the context of the space, I’m led to look more closely at aspects of those themes. With the show at Cample Line, for instance, the proximity to the redundant woolen textile mill interested me because it fits within the interconnected themes recurring in the work. This suggests materials and processes that relate to that specific place, and that triggers an exploration through making. On the one hand, it’s quite rational and logical. On the other hand, the processes of experimental making in the studio allow for an intuitive or organic kind of response.
BW: How do you see printmaking within your practice? Where does it sit in relation to sculpture?
CB: I originally used screen-printing within the installation and sculptural work in the form of printed imagery and motifs on fabrics, which were integrated into the work. I have continued to do that in different ways. Because of the rule I have about not using found objects, when I wanted to have some kind of image on the fabric, it meant that I had to create my own. Over time, I’ve come to realize that the way I approach printmaking and the way that I approach sculpture have a lot of overlaps. Sometimes I see the paper as an object and the ink as other layers of that object—it’s like a flattened sculpture for me.
BW: You’ve spoken about your installations as a kind of pause between making and dismantling. Do you think that there’s a similar kind of moment for viewers, too, when they’re reflecting on the work and whatever thoughts they’ve brought with them? Is it a moment aside from the everyday?
CB: That’s a nice observation. There is an accumulation of elements within the space, and the finishing of the work within the space that comes to a moment of poise, which maybe creates an opportunity for a reflective moment in the space. I’m very clear about trying to create this through the work—a space for really observing and experiencing the work in reality, physically and emotionally, all at once. That is how the work is made as well, you have to be really present and focused.
BW: It’s interesting how form and material initiate a physical and emotional response. There are physical and psychological tensions in the work, a balance between craft and industrial production, between materials. How do you negotiate those things in the making?
CB: There are opposites and tensions in making that come through different processes. Making anything is a process of trying to control the medium and also allowing for freedom. But when you’re creating the installation in the space, there’s another set of dynamics having to do with how the different elements all start to interact with one another. You’re also thinking about how that is going to be encountered by an audience, and you’re trying to almost choreograph and create a sculptural dynamic within the work. At that stage, maybe it’s about communication with an audience as much as communication between material and maker.
BW: While the sculptures are abstract, you tread a line between abstraction and bodily experience, between something conceptual and something visceral. Why are those relationships interesting for you?
CB: There’s something significant about the way that I’m trying to abstract things. It’s to do with recognizing the truth of a kind of everydayness. It’s about glancing across, different ways of looking at things that are tangible, familiar, and physical, and graspable. I’m not creating something that’s out of this world. I’m drawn to abstracting things that are mundane, fundamental, and common. I’m looking at them with different perspectives and merging aspects to create new objects that speak about what’s taken for granted, or overlooked, in the objects. Maybe we think of abstraction as something intellectual, but we are doing it in a bodily and sensory way as well. I want the work to communicate physically and emotionally at once, so there is a connection between thinking and feeling.
BW: What form does your research take?
CB: It could be anything. Reading historical texts, gathering new making skills, experimenting with materials and processes particular to a place. That all may sound obvious, but when it starts to become more particular, you begin to find really interesting aspects. I suppose I’m drawn to the eccentric and the curious. Quite often the starting point is going to see museum collections. I’m drawn to objects within these collections that have the same kind of ambiguity that I’m trying to foster in my work. At the core of my research is looking at how those things relate to the emotional—the ability of the objects to trigger emotion, to trigger memory, to trigger the imagination, to invent scenarios, and to relate them to our experience of our physical human bodies.
BW: What about the small machine-engineered objects that appear in your installations? They have a particular potency. It feels like they have a disproportionate effect in terms of their scale.
CB: Often, I use a small object as a focal point within the work. When working with spaces, I create larger structures that act as a second skin within the space, that relate to the architecture of space, and to how people use it. The smaller objects then inhabit these structures and coax or guide you around the work in different ways. They encourage you to come closer in. I’m trying to encourage people to linger in the space, to get up close so that the physicality of the work is heightened. They encounter a small, sharply machined brass object, perhaps, and they feel it, not just look at it.
I believe that objects have an agency, that materials are not redundant or stagnant; they have an energy that we pick up on. But there are also cultural-historical influences shaping the experience. Ideas of a bowl, a comb, a mirror, a wedge recur in the work in different scales, different forms, different materials, but they speak about the universality of our human experience.
BW: What was it like working on RAWLESS?
CB: It was a great opportunity to connect to things that I’m excited about in terms of the history of textile production—the mill, the dominance of sheep farming within the surrounding landscape—and to work within a gallery that used to be mill workers’ cottages. It was a chance for me to look again at how the domestic finds a way into the workplace, into the factory, into the workshop, and how the workplace is evident within the home, often through made objects—either crafted or manufactured. I went off on different tangents, learning various embroidery stitches and looking into the forging of metal and our relationship with sheep and wool production. All of that feeds into the work but not necessarily in literal ways.
BW: Did you source the materials locally?
CB: No, they come from different places. There is wool from England, gorse from Argyll, but mostly it’s difficult to know the exact origins of materials like steel, polythene, and red oxide paint. It is an aspect of the work to question our lack of understanding about raw materials and how they are processed, distributed, and used, hence the title of the installation—RAWLESS, which I invented to suggest our distance from the “raw.”
BW: It’s a broad material vocabulary that you have at your fingertips.
CB: I work with a very wide range of materials, but I’m not a master of these techniques. I involve other people in some of the fabrication, like the precision-engineering company that makes the machined metal parts. My knowledge of making is diverse, and I like to try and understand technique through practice and engagement, even if I involve somebody else in production, because the sculptural ideas and more eccentric ways of working stem from understanding the nature, scope, and limitations of materials. I’m not necessarily using techniques of making in conventional ways—for instance, I layer red oxide paint onto polythene and sew wool onto steel. It’s in that play with materials along the way that the sculptural work evolves.
BW: But you like to learn new techniques?
CB: For RAWLESS, I wanted to use hot metal techniques rather than the welding and powder coating that I’ve been doing recently. That meant finding someone who had a forge and learning the basics, which I was able to do. I made the pointy hooks, which have the right aesthetic quality that speaks of a hand-forged tool. With their visible hammer marks, they have the heritage associations of a particular range of found objects that connect the domestic to the workplace.
BW: What about the pervasive scent within the installation?
CB: I wanted the smell of lanolin within the space. Again, I was thinking of the sense of detachment from the “raw,” because even so-called raw materials are processed to a large degree before we encounter them. Lanolin comes from the scouring process of cleaning the wool and then extracting the wool grease, which is then refined in the step before the product that you use on your skin. The lanolin here is designed for lubricating machinery or preserving leather, so it smells slightly stronger. I’ve extruded it through little holes in the metal panel. So, there’s something about it meant to be with the metal and meant to be with the wool. There is compatibility, and yet you’re encountering it in a way that presents an oddness. That’s an example of what I am trying to attain with the idea of abstraction. The smell of the lanolin triggers memory and encourages sensory engagement, and the wool cloth, the gorse, the steel, and the rust all add to the olfactory layers.
BW: Was there anything in RAWLESS that really surprised you?
CB: I’ve made work on a large scale for post-industrial spaces and custom-built galleries, but this was very much a domestic space, and I struggled to create an installation that wouldn’t become fragmented or seem like a collection of separate autonomous sculptures. I needed something to create that second skin to control the movement of people around the space and draw them in. That’s when I had the idea of using the painted polythene to divide the space and create the connection between floor and ceiling beam, between floor and artwork—creating an environment rather than a series of sculptures.
BW: In the 1960s, the art critic Frank Whitford said of Eduardo Paolozzi’s making, “Risk-taking is simply a function of the situation.” What about risk and uncertainty in your work?
CB: I believe it’s important for visual art like mine to be experienced in person, especially installation works that rely on the processing of sensory information. Galleries and project spaces have become even more important in keeping that experience alive and relevant, because the work does not exist until it is created in the space. Yes, there is a risk involved in that, which I enjoy. But it’s not an intention of the work to be risky, it’s just an inevitable, necessary part of making with that approach. You don’t, you can’t, know what the work will become until it comes into being within the space.
I should say something more about being drawn to ambiguity and precariousness and how the work develops in a physical and emotional way at the same time. I was taken by a T.S. Eliot quote that Philip Pullman mentioned on the radio, in which he was talking about poetry and how it communicates before it’s understood. Drawing solely on thematic frameworks for the work can be really reductive. Allowing the imagination and more subtle improvisations and experiential thought processes to play out is important.
Claire Barclay’s installation RAWLESS is on view at Cample Line in Thornhill, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, through September 8, 2024.
