Born 1968, Paisley, Scotland

Claire Barclay studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1986-1990 (BA Sculpture and Environmental Art) and from 1991-1993 (Master of Fine Art).

Barclay’s work is predominantly in the form of sculpture created for specific gallery environments or other sites. She typically combines large-scale structures with smaller, specially engineered or crafted ‘hybrid’ objects. The installations are deliberately designed to avoid direct reference to everyday reality so that they do not have literal meaning but coalesce to ‘inhabit the space’. They thus demand a personal response from the viewer and encourage reflection on how we relate to spaces, materials and objects in the real world.

Her work has been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including recent shows at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2002), the Venice Biennale (2003), Tate Britain (2004), the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2007), the Musée d'Art Moderne, Luxembourg (2009), the Whitechapel Gallery (Bloomberg Commission) (2010-11) and Skulpturi, Copenhagen (2011).

Barclay’s practice also involves printmaking, something which arose from her use of printed fabrics in some of her installations. She went on to making screenprints on paper and found a strong correlation between ideas underpinning her three-dimensional work and the use of shape and form in her printmaking.

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