Claire Barclay: Take to The Ground

Claire Barclay makes sculptural works and site-specific projects from a variety of man-made and natural materials. One of her areas of interest is the potential for materials to communicate and trigger emotional and psychological responses in the viewer.

Her sculptural works are materials based, but increasingly have a lightness and flamboyance about them, communicated by the artist's choice of bright colours and modern synthetic fabrics. These new materials sit alongside - often uncomfortably - natural materials such as wood, feathers and leather. The combination of these materials highlights the clash between the natural and the man-made, alluding to the complex ways in which human beings perceive and interact with nature.

For The Showroom, Claire Barclay made a series of works that are seductive, yet ideologically or ethically problematic in some aspect of their make-up. This was implied through her choice of materials and through the oblique and contradictory references that they contained. These references centred on the increasing commercialism of new age and eco-friendly life-styles; this raiseed the problematic juxtaposition of our obsession with the pure, the natural, and the environmentally friendly and our seduction by the synthetic, the hi-tech and the mass-produced.