Claire Barclay: Shape of things to come

Published on Friday 13 February 2009 18:19

Claire Barclay stretches the imagination with her explorations of our relationship with the material and natural worlds around us, writes Moira Jeffrey

CLAIRE BARCLAY, OPENWIDE

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

I'M THE kind of person who hasn't seen a treadmill or lifted a weight in aeons, but this week at the Fruitmarket Gallery I had a distinctly body conscious moment. Subject To Habit, a new installation by the Scottish sculptor Claire Barclay, is an interlinked sequence of frame-like structures of gorgeous planed wood and black metal evoking a gym bench and a fairly fiendish looking piece of training equipment.

On one side a series of black vinyl mats spill on to the floor, but something is wrong. What, at first glance, look like dumb-bells are rendered useless if not downright dangerous, by imbalance and incongruous square shapes and sharp edges. There are shiny discs of polished metal, which might be weights, but one of them is filled with ominous goo I take to be engine grease. On one bench a pointed red cone sits perkily, a sharp surprise for the unsuspecting.

If this is a gym, it is a gym somewhere between heaven and hell: outrageously deluxe and clearly handcrafted, but at the same time more than a little bit threatening. It seems to promise a fetishist's workout, but just what is being fetishised remains obscurely out of reach.

Barclay, 40, has crafted a career out of shaping, pummelling and stretching. Openwide, her first major public gallery show in Scotland for about six years, reminds us just how far she is prepared to stretch her materials, to ask persistent and troubling questions about our relationship with the objects around us.

In the course of her career the artist has created or commissioned a diverse range of objects using an array of techniques. She has shaped both raw and fired clay, taught herself to make corn dollies, blown glass and used stitched and printed cloth. She has employed animal skins and leather, feathers and jute. Humble techniques such as macram, crochet and weaving have sat alongside precision-engineered steel, polished brass and carved horn.

Underlying this diversity is a fascinating conversation about our relationship with the material and natural worlds – a tension between hunting and gathering ideologies in her show Ideal Pursuits at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2003; a playful poke at new-age philosophy at the Tate in 2004; our self-conscious embrace of all things eco and natural in After The Field, a show in a disused barn at Glasgow's Dumbreck Stables last year. Most stunningly, she played on our love of antiquity in her virtuoso sequence of rooms in an ornate and fading palazzo for the Scottish presentation at the Venice Biennale in 2003.

Barclay's work has often asked questions about how and why we shape our world, build in it and on it, fill it with stuff. It's a while since her work has made such an explicit link between the shaping of the external world and the shaping of the body. If her scary gymnasium highlights the fact that most of us no longer keep fit by running after deer with a bow and arrow or by picking fruit from high boughs, an accompanying installation, Caught In Corners, wryly suggests that in recent years we have also embraced the traditional and the natural as a kind of virtue in itself. A bulky construction made from hay bales dressed in lime render, it echoes the modern revival of ancient building techniques, but is perhaps as much a trap as a shelter.

On the one hand this juxtaposition asks what happens when we become divorced from the state of nature. On the other it highlights the way the natural has become a kind of modern luxury in itself. The work suggests the home, the gym, the creation of complex, designed interior worlds.

In the ground-floor gallery, a room-sized installation entitled Openwide is something that followers of the Glasgow School of Art graduate thought they would never see: a retrospective. Barclay is a restless artist who doesn't remake her art.

Within the large sculptural schemes she creates, however, are small recurring elements, hand-crafted objects or small machine-made shapes that are usually domestic in scale. They are often familiar but strangely useless, spindles of turned wood that suggest tools or furniture, cups and combs that would be impossible to use. Beak-like cones, grubby clay vessels.

Barclay has created a complex display that part displays, part conceals these odd treasures. These objects are part of a family of forms that appear and reappear in different guises. Now they are odd orphans, pointing out the consistent threads in her interests, as well as her phenomenal attention to detail.

More controversially, there is also a subliminal suggestion that contemporary society with its endless acquisitiveness is not so much a decadent corruption of the natural state but a kind of honed and refined instinct somewhat out of control. If the current trends in evolutionary biology and psychology are to be believed then perhaps Barclay simply restates our pre-programmed impulses, to collect and create. Scratch at the surface and you can sniff the guilt and excitement of shopping, the pride at a mantelpiece display.

Yet all the while, Barclay retains some kind of cool conceptual distance from that which she creates or assembles. As a whole the exhibition is an exemplary workout. Barclay is at heart a tough and disciplined artist of formidable commitment and skills. v

Until April 12 www.fruitmarket.co.uk