Claire Barclay is a Scottish artist known for large-scale installations consisting of collections of sculptural objects brought together into precisely plotted relationships. Combining craft and machine-finished processes, and both everyday and precious materials. Barclay's art is precariously balanced between function and dysfunction, understanding and bafflement.
Claire Barclay's Open Wide exhibition ran from 7 February – 12 April 2009 at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.
Claire Barclay is a Scottish artist known for large-scale installations consisting of collections of sculptural objects brought together into precisely plotted relationships. Combining craft and machine-finished processes, and both everyday and precious materials. Barclay's art is precariously balanced between function and dysfunction, understanding and bafflement. This book was published to accompany a major exhibition of Barclay's work at The Fruitmarket Gallery. It documents significant installations made throughout her career and includes a chronology tracing her mature artistic activity back to 1990.
There are new texts by Fiona Bradley, Penelope Curtis and Claire Doherty, and a conversation between Claire Barclay and Francis McKee. As her work is made in and for a particular contexts, and is often dismantled after exhibition, priority is given in this book to images, allowing the works something of an after-life, and the reader and opportunity to trace the development of Barclay's singular sculptural language.